( 45 reviews )
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Posted: Jul 27 2009
I would call it the literary equivalent of a funky Mom & Pop diner you & a friend find by accident, far, far from the interstate, where it turns out that the side-dishes & coffee miss the mark, but the burgers, fried chicken, & homemade pie are truly outstanding. I was in the mood for a fast-reading, entertaining, & imaginative escape, written in prose that would have just enough intellect thrown in. That's basically what I got. However, I had to be willing to go the extra mile in suspending my disbelief in order to let that happen. Had I been in a critical mood when I read it, I would probably write a very harsh review based on the extreme degree to which it requires readers to simply accept anything & everything the author feels like dropping into the story from one paragraph to the next. Like many others, I found the "Matrix-y" bit near the end where Jane battles in Vegas to be rather unreasonable even for the characters involved & for the world in which the story takes place. Apparently Ruff himself agreed, because one of the characters later makes a sort of apology for the "Matrix-y" bit. Rather than being satisfying, though, the apology made the issue much worse, and struck me as a very nearly buzz-killing sign of weak writing. I felt distracted by a strong desire to ask the author, "If you're apologizing for your own plot device, why the hell didn't you re-work that part of the book instead? Shouldn't you have come up with something that needs no apology?" However, if we assume the story Ruff set-up in the first 80-90% of the book, and the ending he gives in the last few pages are BOTH fixed elements of the story, then it seems the author wrote probably himself to the edge of a crevasse which he had no other means of crossing except by the abrupt barrel-rolls & whiplash turns of the last 10-15% of the book. In that respect, it also reminds me of the TV show "LOST". It has been a fun show, but you have to really be willing to suspend the heck out of your disbelief to enjoy it, and I don't see how "LOST" can possibly manage to tie everything up into a satisfying ending. OVERALL: Fun, fast-paced, out of the ordinary, but held back from a higher rating by genuine flaws.
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Posted: Jun 18 2009
I really don't understand why people are being so hard on this book. I thought it was a refreshing change of pace from the usual scifi or thriller novel. It's a fast paced read that holds your interest from the very first page. The story progresses as a tale being told by a woman under arrest for murder. Is she insane or does she really work for some secret organization whose business is ridding the world of evil people (bad monkeys)? At times I found myself believing she was telling the truth and at others it seemed that she had to be insane. I didn't see the ending coming at all. The story does go off the deep end quite a bit towards the end and maybe that's what turned some people off. The people who are supposed to be the good guys end up being bad guys or is it the other way around? Anyway, the story keeps you on your toes just to keep up with who's who and what side they're on. If you're into quirky stories, give it a shot.
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Posted: Jun 16 2009
The first hundred or so pages of this book are a joy to read, very tightly written with all sorts of possibilities open to be the path the story follows. But it becomes too cartoonish before a twist ending tries to reset things by making the story a bit less of a cartoon. I gave it 3 stars and not less because of the beginning.
