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Book Review: Timothy by Greg Herren

By Amazon, Books & Authors, ReviewsNo Comments
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 I’ve read a few of Greg Herren’s short stories and enjoyed them, so when the opportunity to review Timothy I jumped at the chance. But ultimately I was to be very disappointed.

In Timothy the meek, uninteresting and Unnamed main character – whom I might add has had a tragic life so far – meets Carlo Romaniello. Carlo is a mega rich widower who instantly falls in love with the main character. After a week of bliss they get married.

Carlo has a huge mansion called Spindrift and takes his new husband to this home. The Unnamed main character is to take over the running of the household and its staff. Carlo is often away on business trips.

But Spindrift is filled with Timothy. Timothy was Carlo’s husband prior to his death. Timothy was a gorgeous-looking model, a talented photographer and had his own successful underwear range. Basically everything the unnamed main character isn’t.

As the main character adapts to his new life in Spindrift, he learns bits about Carlo & Timothy’s relationship. He fills in the blanks often wrongly. But the truth does eventually come out about Timothy and his death.

There were two fundamental problems with this novel for me. Firstly that every aspect of the novel felt like a cliché. The helpless and poor younger gay man meets a wealthy older good looking gay man. They get married after a week – I mean come on, who does that? and they move to a castle…whoops a mansion…and live happily ever after. Timothy read like a cliché fairytale with a gay slant.

Second was the main character. The unnamed main character lacked any realism and was essentially boring. He responded more emotionally to his perceived relationship problems than to the death of his father, whom was his only living relative.

The plot was predictable and not enough actually happened. Important plot points – like the first week where the two characters fell in love and their marriage were mentioned but not actually shown/told in the story. This inevitably effected the pacing negatively. Often the story gave little intrigue or hooks to encourage the reader to read on.

The description was reasonable. But because of the recurrent clichés it was hard to suspend reality and become absorbed within the story. Timothy is available to buy on Amazon if you’d like to. But I can’t honestly recommend it.

Review soon,

Antony



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Tuesday 28 November 2017

Book Review: The Marble Collector by Cecelia Ahern

By Amazon, Books & Authors, ReviewsNo Comments
the-marble-collector-ahern-book-cover Ahern’s books are either a hit or a miss with me. The Marble Collector was most definitely a miss. If I had to choose one word to describe this novel it would be: dull. Or pointless. Or boring.

The Marble Collector is essentially two stories rolled into one.

The first story is that of Fergus Boggs who is an avid and secretive Marble Collector. It is the story of his life that starts in his childhood and proceeds over the decades through his adolescence and adulthood, right into his present old age.

The second story is is an extraordinary day in the life of Boggs’ daughter Sabrina. It stars with her throwing a cup at a wall in work, which leads to her being sent home by her boss.

Then there’s a delivery of a marble collection that she didn’t know her father even had collected, never mind kept. Sabrina discovers her father’s life long obsession with marbles.

As Sabrina looks through the marble collection, she notices that the two sets of marbles that are worth the most money are gone. So she sets off on a mission to find the missing marbles and along the way learns more about her emotionally distant father and more about herself.

Both of the main characters were uninteresting and lacked depth. The idea behind the novel was reasonable at best, but the plot was completely flat. The pacing was slow throughout. Description of scenes and characters were sparse, but mostly adequate. Pages and pages of words were wasted, with these pages adding little to the two dimensional characters or plot.

I wanted to like The Marble Collector by Cecelia Ahern. But I have found it difficult to find anything positive to write. The best part of the The Marble Collector was reaching the end of it.

You can buy The Marble Collector by Cecelia Ahern on Amazon and at all good book shops, but I wouldn’t bother. In fact The Marble Collector was bad enough to put me off from pre-ordering any of Ahern’s books in future.

Review soon,

Antony

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Tuesday 10 January 2017

Book Review: Eve & Adam by Michael Grant and Katherine Applegate

By Amazon, Books & Authors, ReviewsNo Comments
eve-&-adam-book-cover After being hit by the car, Eve goes flying through the air. The next thing she’s vaguely aware of what’s happening – her mother arguing with the doctor and then being transferred to her rich mother’s pharmaceutical headquarters.

It’s like a private hospital where Eve is the only patient. As she recovers, she’s got sexy Solo pushing her around in a wheelchair. Then she comes to an agreement with her mother to trial software to create the perfect man for herself, who she names Adam.

But there are secrets everywhere. Eve is about to uncover these secrets and then will have to make some difficult choices about what to do with the truth.

I really wanted to enjoy this book. Especially after loving Michael Grant’s Gone Series and knowing that Katherine Applegate is his wife. I hate to give a bad review, but I was disappointed with Eve & Adam.

I just didn’t care about any of the characters. At the beginning of the book as Eve is flying through the air thinking that her life is about to end. Rather than thinking of loved ones, she thinks about an Apple. I felt that the authors had done this conceitedly to make links to Adam & Eve for the purpose of marketing the book. It felt unnatural and therefore Eve felt unreal.

Solo marginally more real, but was a great source of conflict for me. He’s this techno whizz-kid who is described as looking like a surfer, yet doesn’t know some of the fundamental details of his own history. Details that would have been in the computer systems that he so expertly knows after living at the pharmaceutical headquarters for so long.

Aislin, Eve’s best friend did have some believability and depth but was a minor character. It’s always worrying when authors make a minor character more interesting than a main character.

A problem I had with all of the characters is that they conveniently had all of the knowledge, skills, equipment and resources as they needed them. The authors did this by slotting a sentence of backstory in that the reader didn’t know up until the point the characters needed something. It felt like very convenient and lazy storytelling.

The plot was tediously predictable at times verged on being boring. The only reason I carried on reading when I felt bored was because I was half way through the book. I hoped it would get better, have some interesting plot twists, but it didn’t.

Eve & Adam isn’t badly written. The description, dialogue, grammar, punctuation and spelling are all good. It was just the characters and plot that I didn’t enjoy.

Eve & Adam is available to buy on Amazon.

Review soon,

Antony

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Wednesday 17 September 2014

Book Review: Zombie Apocalypse! by Stephen Jones

By Books & Authors, ReviewsNo Comments
zombie-apocalypse-stephen-jones After enjoying reading about flesh-eating zombies in The Fear by Charlie Higson (see Book Review: The Fear by Charlie Higson), while in my local supermarket I saw Zombie Apocalypse! by Stephen Jones. With the stereotypical title “Zombie Apocalypse!” and front cover (depicting London is ruins in the background and zombies with bloody mouths in the forefront) I nearly put it back on the shelf. But then I read the back and it revealed the story would be told through the medium of eyewitness narratives through text messages, official reports, blogs, letters, diaries, etc. It looked interesting so I picked it up.

The opening chapter was long and dull but I read on hoping it would get better. The general storyline is that the New Festival of Britain is taking place in South London. In order to create a festival site they choose to dig up the graves at All Hallows Church. In one of the crypts fleas from the bubonic plague are released causing the reanimation virus. The storyline feels a bit disjointed and that’s because various authors wrote different chapters. It appears Steve Jones was just the person that put the chapters together.

As the story continues we are introduced to groups of characters, some of which are killed off or become zombies. The problem with this book was that the characters constantly change meaning you can’t make a connection with any of them. The characters changing is part of the story as the reanimation virus spreads from London to Mexico and various other places around the world. Apart from the odd good chapter I found this book boring in all honesty. Indeed at times I had to force myself to read on.

Towards the end of the book they find a treatment for the reanimation virus however the future of humanity remains unsure with a letter from the Zombiefied Queen of Great Britain.

I was utterly disappointed with the book. Remembering to my gut feeling in response to the cover I shouldn’t have picked it up. Next time I will make sure that I follow my gut feeling.

Write soon,

Antony

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Sunday 20 November 2011
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