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I started reading this yesterday, as a passenger of a very long drive, and oy. I had such hopes.
The dialoge is wooden; and when emotional events occur, these cardboard-cool characters react with pop-up expressions that leave me uncaring.
The conspiracy-theory setting, mashed with occultism, only serves to distance me instead of engross. Twelve Hawk's attempt to trump all the other mythologies and big-brother conspiracies, rather than work with them, means that this book suffers from what many amateur fantasists suffer; the notion that if it's bigger and more complex, it must be better.
The notion of cool, or the attempted stab in that direction, permeates through the book. The 'shopping lists' of what each cool character is wearing/owning/packing in hidden comparments, often has nothing to do with the plot directly, and so these half-page derivations seem like glaring attempts to make these people 'cooler,' using the Matrix as it's starting place.
Someone else mentioned that Twelve Hawks was the prince of exposition. A well deserved title! Rather than telling me WHY Maya, our Hero Harlequin, carries a sword in whichever position and why it's hidden in whatever location, why not just have her USE it, and TAKE it, thereby showing us without hitting us over the head with how cool these people are.
As a last ranty bit, these characters are practically super-human at times, super-secret-ninja-spys, yet they're capable of being tricked, captured, killed, or converted whenever the plot demands.
These are a few of the points that had me smacking my forehead while reading this. Most of all was the fact that this was published.
(But maybe I'm being too harsh. Earlier that day I was reading Pynchon.) |
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