I too am alive!! A quick run down of what has happened to me in the last couple of months:-some arson
-some surgery
-a general AND a local anaesthetic
-a new job
-AND The Stranger by Max Frei. Really, this book is the main reason for the lack of posting on my behalf. A bit of arson I can handle no problem (I wasn't the arsonist, I was the arsonee); a five hundred page book that never seems to go anywhere...not as easy to get through. And then in preparation for this review, I just looked at the Max Frei entry on Wikipedia and discovered that it is the first of TEN books. That is a lot of not going anywhere.
What first grabbed me about this book was the quote on the cover: "If Harry Potter smoked cigarettes and took a certain matter-of-fact pleasure in administering tough justice he might like Max Frei". In my mind, Max Frei was a combination of Harry Potter, Philip Marlowe and someone from a Neil Gaiman book. Not so. More like a thirty year old insomniac who didn't have any kind of a life until he was transported to a land he first encountered in his dreams and told he had magic powers and made into the 2IC of the secret magical police. The crimes he has to solve are weird, and he seems to develop any magical power which the situation demands. In fact, in this new land ('Echo') it seems Sir Max can do no wrong. Yawn.
I seriously think I have been reading this book for about a month. It is enjoyable enough while I am actually reading it, but when I am not reading it, I have absolutely no motivation to pick it up again. In between sections of this I have read 5 Harry Potter books, a couple of upcoming YA novels (including the new Scott Westerfeld... excitement central), Jane Eyre (again) and The Secret Garden. Page turner this ain't. In fact, I still haven't finished it..I've invested 400 pages worth of time into it, I have to finish it at some point... just don't expect it any time soon.
6/10
Posts
