Thursday, January 5, 2017

Wicklow's Odyssey by R. Cooper

2 STARS

Well thank God that's done with!  It wasn't Wicklow's Odyssey, it felt more like mine!  How long did the Odyssey take in classical literature?  10 years?  Felt like it took me 10 years to read instead of almost 10 days.

There was so much internal shit going on with Wicklow Doyle and it was the same stuff repeated over and over again.  And to be honest, there was some stuff that even by the end of the book I wasn't clear on whatever Wicklow was going on about.  Most of the time was spent with him whining about the same things to himself over and over again - why Rhoades did this, the same this again and again, the pain in his stomach that sounded more like an ulcer than anything romantic, and why did Rhoades say this or that - again and again.  Repetitive, you get my drift.

Part of the reason I picked up this book was because it was billed as a steampunk American Civil War romance.  That sounded really intriguing.  But for the great majority of the book, aside from all the repetitive blah-blah about radios and a few mentions of air raids from dirigibles, there was no steampunk.  Only in the second to last chapter when the BFM (Big Fucking Machine) was unveiled - it was a tank type thing - did I feel we got to see some actual steampunk elements.

And the chapters!  OMG, they were long, long, LONG!  I honestly think that it makes books a chore to read when authors make their chapters overly long or even of wildly differing lengths.  Something about the unconscious part of my reading mind.

Now the story itself was good.  I love a story about a team who have grown to care about each other, led by an enigmatic type of man who inspires great loyalty etc...  But it was so lost beneath the load of all those repetitive words, over and over and over again.  And the love scenes.... well... I found that they were often flowery and over-blown and each time way too emotionally intense.  In this case, less would have been more, I think.

Oh... I really wanted a final confirmation of Mariama's (and Louis') fate.  Didn't get it.

Unfortunately, my first read of 2017 was a dud and I will be very wary of anything by this author again..  But... onward and upward, right?  :)

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