Summary (at least in theory): There's this guy, and he lives in a small town somewhere in the north, and stuff happens in this small town. And there's even a couple murders that this guy ends up solving purely by accident (This isn't like the books where someone is like "I want to solve this crime, let me just go put myself in a dangerous situation where the killer is likely to show up and then s/he will confess and I'll miraculously escape and capture/kill him/her"; this is the killer shows up at his house and casually mentions it over dinner.). In other words, I have no f-ing idea what the plot was meant to be, and no idea how the turkeys are relevent. Granted this is the 26th book in a series, so maybe it makes more sense as a continuing saga of this dude and his town? That's the only explanation I can come up with. Still, I'm pretty sure every cynical comment my mom has ever made about The Babysitters Club books counts for this series as well, only instead of developing the characters, this book focuses exclusively on the setting. Really, I couldn't care less about the 10 page transcript of this person's fictional radio broadcast about the Great Storm of 1913.
Reaction: I think I already covered most of that in the last section, hehhheh. The book has very little in the way of plot or characters (I mean, there are people and events, but the main thing that kepts me reading the book was that I was waiting for something interesting to happen. And, for the most part, nothing really did. I'm not sure I can come up with a better summary than "stuff happens". I mean, there's a 200th aniversary celebration for the neighboring town, but while that is the closest to a focus I can find for the book, it hardly counts as plot. And I know very little about any of the characters besides the occupations of a couple of them.). It's basically focusing on the town and provides some stories of town history and uses some of the characters to illustrate what the town is like. Oh, and apparently the guy's cat is psychic or something, but nothing ever comes of that. Yano, reading the description of this book, or possibly one of the others in the series made me think that either this series was a rip-off of the Rita Mae Brown series I mentioned in a previous post or vice versa. And it's now very clear which is which. Look at it: both have a protagonist solving a series of murders (this one purely by accident), intelligent animal(s) who try to help (at least in the other one they explained what they were doing), a small town (that used it more for atmosphere; in this one, it basically was the book. I'm not interested in reading a history of a fictional town when said history is being passed off as a novel only they're not going to tell you that.), even the authors' names are similar (Brown vs Braun).
Basically, I consider reading this book to have been a waste of time. Maybe I would've enjoyed it more if the book jacket hadn't implied that something was actually going to happen. But no, most of the book served no purpose to the plot. Er, I shouldn't say that. That implies that I have some idea what the plot is. According to the book jacket, it's the murders and the turkeys. I believe those two between the two of them cover maybe a quarter of the book. Maybe. More if you include the previous scenes involving the people responsible. Ok, looking at it from that angle, I can see how many of the scenes are an attempt at introducing the people responsible and dropping hints about their suspiciousness. But that still means that there was approximately 20 pages (out of less than 200) that were basically setting up a less than 3 sentence exchange. And I still have no idea how the turkeys have any connection whatsoever to anything else in the book other than the cat being special.
Um, yeah. I totally meant to end this after the first sentence of that last paragraph or maybe the second, but I guess my cynicism and irritation with the book kinda took over. Oops?
No comments:
Post a Comment