2006-01-03 09:42![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
digitaldiscipline
digitaldisciplineSo, I cracked into the random book my folks shot me as something to unwrap from under the tree yesterday. "The Jester," by James Patterson and Andrew Gross.
Don't, whatever you do, buy this book. It's awful. The writing is bad (bad style, bad grammar). The plot contrivances are obvious and amateurish.
In short, other than a lot of uninteresting and gory medieval combat scenes, this would be the sort of novel that gets turned into a made-for-deep-cable-and-aired-at-3am movie. Boy joins the Crusades (for no clearly articulated reason; he has a beautiful and loving wife at home); boy deserts Crusades after improbable encounter; boy finds wife and home destroyed. How, precisely, the destroyers get there before he does (since they probably -didn't- desert), and why the so-obviously-evil bad person who spends the rest of the book killing people for sport doesn't run him through at the moment he picked up the deus ex machina are neven given a moment's thought, and yet this is the linchpin of the whole sorry tale.
90% of the book is written in the first person by the eponymous protagonist. The other 10% is so jarringly presented in third person semi-omniscient that it's a complete trainwreck when you stumble upon one of the three-page chapters. That's right - there are about a hundred chapters in this thing, none more than five pages long. My own style has section breaks every few hundred words, but these clowns would have a full chapter break between consecutive lines of dialogue. I don't know who is to blame - lousy writers, lazy editors, or what. It's akin to channel surfing in some sort of History Channel broadcast hell, where every station is showing the same bad movie, ten seconds off from every other.
So, in summary, I am left disgusted by this on several levels. One, that such tripe is published at all (and that it is undoubtedly made and marketed at the expense of superior work by someone without the name clout of Patterson; Jay, I know publishing is a business, and that big houses are all in the blockbuster biz... which is why you'll have something with my name on a SASE darkening your door for P6). Two, that historical fiction is now the vehicle of choice for hacks and charlatans (want good historical fiction? Read Christopher Moore's "Lamb." You can thank me later).
I had to read 15 months' worth of Calvin and Hobbes to scrub my brain afterwards.
Final Rating: Zero out of any number of stars.
Don't, whatever you do, buy this book. It's awful. The writing is bad (bad style, bad grammar). The plot contrivances are obvious and amateurish.
In short, other than a lot of uninteresting and gory medieval combat scenes, this would be the sort of novel that gets turned into a made-for-deep-cable-and-aired-at-3am movie. Boy joins the Crusades (for no clearly articulated reason; he has a beautiful and loving wife at home); boy deserts Crusades after improbable encounter; boy finds wife and home destroyed. How, precisely, the destroyers get there before he does (since they probably -didn't- desert), and why the so-obviously-evil bad person who spends the rest of the book killing people for sport doesn't run him through at the moment he picked up the deus ex machina are neven given a moment's thought, and yet this is the linchpin of the whole sorry tale.
90% of the book is written in the first person by the eponymous protagonist. The other 10% is so jarringly presented in third person semi-omniscient that it's a complete trainwreck when you stumble upon one of the three-page chapters. That's right - there are about a hundred chapters in this thing, none more than five pages long. My own style has section breaks every few hundred words, but these clowns would have a full chapter break between consecutive lines of dialogue. I don't know who is to blame - lousy writers, lazy editors, or what. It's akin to channel surfing in some sort of History Channel broadcast hell, where every station is showing the same bad movie, ten seconds off from every other.
So, in summary, I am left disgusted by this on several levels. One, that such tripe is published at all (and that it is undoubtedly made and marketed at the expense of superior work by someone without the name clout of Patterson; Jay, I know publishing is a business, and that big houses are all in the blockbuster biz... which is why you'll have something with my name on a SASE darkening your door for P6). Two, that historical fiction is now the vehicle of choice for hacks and charlatans (want good historical fiction? Read Christopher Moore's "Lamb." You can thank me later).
I had to read 15 months' worth of Calvin and Hobbes to scrub my brain afterwards.
Final Rating: Zero out of any number of stars.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
(no subject)
However, I recommend without reservation any and everything Moore has written (it's humorous and clever and irreverent and well-written); even the sex scenes are funny (on purpose).
(no subject)
Definitely right about Lamb. I keep pushing it on people too.