Blue

I'm very surprised...I didn't like this book as much as I thought I would. I know it's all subjective and some people adore this book, and I can understand why. I guess this book just wasn't for me. I feel like maybe if I had first read this book when I was younger, I would have been in love with it.

I was certainly very interested in the book and was excited to read it. I've dabbled in some of Neil Gaiman's other works, and I enjoy them a lot. Coraline definitely has this really intriguing “comfy gothic” premise, if I had to try and describe it. I think the main problem is that I just wasn't a fan of the prose. Everything is very dejected, very dry, very to the point. There was no emotion in the writing. It was like reading someone's grocery list, in a way.

I'm very affected by how the prose presents the story. I can't get into the story if the prose is dry and emotionless. I didn't feel any sense of urgency, any real danger from Coraline's journey. I wonder if it's because the book is a bit more universal and not strictly for adults, but some of my favorite books are like that. Matilda by Roald Dahl is my favorite book of all time, and it's considered a children's book. But there's so much emotion and feeling in how the story is narrated, it still delights me as an adult. I didn't really feel that from this one.

There were definitely parts that were quite spooky and descriptions that I thought were legitimately creepy, which were my favorite parts. At times, the book did have good atmosphere that I was thought was engaging to read. And I will say that there was never a part in the book where I got bored and didn't want to go on. The story was compelling enough to make me want to read on and see what would happen...it was just a dry, humorless experience.

I know these are all subjective thoughts, but I thought I would write them down to be as honest as possible. Someone I know in real life has this as their favorite book of all time, and it's not like I don't understand why. I guess in the end, there were just too many things in this book that made it not tailored for a reader like me. Which is just a bit disappointing, since I was quite hyped to read this book and also really respect Neil Gaiman's craft.

It's so weird, though. This book is beloved and has won many awards. Maybe it really is just a case of me waiting too long to read it? I guess I'm the odd one out here.

2.5/5

Full disclosure, I mostly read this book because I was curious about cozy mysteries and the character is half Asian with an ethnic mom and a white dad, just like me.

I don't feel fair criticizing the things I want to be critical about in this book because most of them are staples of cozy mystery books. I don't want to sound like I'm shaming people for liking the things that these books are known for.

So, I'll just leave my short and simple thoughts right here: as cute and relatable as this book was, I unfortunately don't think it was for me. It followed what I perceived to be the usual cozy mystery formula with all of the usual cliches and tropes you can expect. There's nothing in this book that surprises or shakes things up. I think the main thing that makes it stand out is the fact that it's Asian. But there's nothing wrong with that! This is a funny, light-hearted, and easy read, and if that's what you're looking for, you'll enjoy this book.

I gave the book an extra half-star for how relatable the main character is to me and the fact that we share the same opinion on the word “oriental.”

Note: There are some plot spoilers revealed in this review, so please read with caution if you don't want things spoiled!

I'm going to preface this review by being completely honest. When I see a book that has “James Patterson” co-writing with another author on it, I already get an expectation of what's written inside, and it may not exactly be the most flattering thing. I don't read them if I want a deeply rich and engrossing read. I don't read it if I want a compelling story or richly-written characters. None of that kind of stuff. Patterson to me has always been quick reads with entertainment as the priority.

I mean, there's nothing wrong with that. There's absolutely nothing wrong with wanting nothing more than an exciting and/or entertaining story. Sometimes, that's all you need for a book to be good. I respect that and understand that. But, I will say, that as a result, these Patterson collaboration books can come off as rather shallow to me. I don't know how much of it can contributed to Michael Ledwidge and how much is attributed to Patterson. I don't really read Ledwidge, so I can't personally anything on his behalf. I've heard from rumors that books like these, Patterson only writes a small chunk or more or less “produces” the book. Who knows? I don't, so I won't really be focusing on who might've done what. That being said, I went into this with sort of low but understanding expectations, and Zoo doesn't really do anything to change that for me. Without spoilers and without rambling on, Zoo has an interesting premise that's filled with areas of mediocrity in execution in character, plot, and prose, but is entertaining enough if you don't ask for much out of this book.

Open discussion of plot past this point, including spoilers.

The premise is intriguing enough, and one that sounds like it could really lend itself to be a cool science thriller of some kind. Animals are seemingly attacking human around the world on a widespread scale, almost in a coordinated way. The main character, nicknamed Oz, is trying to prove that this phenomena exists to the skeptics who refuse to believe and find its cause as everything descends into chaos and humans are subject to an onslaught of attacks from the animal population.

So, first things first: About the writing, I know Patterson books has a sort of style of writing where they focus on shorter chapters and sentences. It quickens up the pace and keeps things moving, which I appreciate. I can't Zoo being twice its length and having denser writing, I probably wouldn't have the resolve to finish it. And it really helps with a book like this in its job, which is to be an engaging page thriller. I will admit though, it does have the effect of making the writing feel choppy. Chapters will end quickly, scenes will come and go. It doesn't help that there's a five year time skip in the middle of the story which comes out of absolute nowhere. It's the most jarring effect. Its placement doesn't make any sense to me. Oz finds out his girlfriend has been killed by his pet chimpanzee (a bit more on that later), and he just makes some little quip about it to his new and very obviously written love interest (also more on that later) and then...time skip? No reaction to anything else? No retrospect on the firsthand data he's collected? No little narrative transition of “And Oz realized the journey had only just begun.”? It's like there was a chunk of the story that was lost in the fire, and the authors really didn't want to try to rewrite it or make smooth transitions, so they just put a time skip in there and called it good. I'm not saying that they had to write 100 extra pages of story to link together the two parts of the book (though I think it maybe would've been better, more on that later as well), but...I don't know. It's a move that utterly confuses me as a reader.

Second, something that personally stood out to me as being weak: the characters and how they're written. Oz himself doesn't really stand out to me in any way, or at least in a way that I think is good. I guess I do appreciate that he's more of an outcast in the scientific community instead of established and respected scientists, it's different and a source of interesting conflict. Or actually, it should be a source of interesting conflict, but it's only that way for about 30% of the story and then it's disregarded after the time skip (when he's now the head authority and being consulted by the President of the United States). It's like he was trying to be written as an antithesis to a stereotypical scientist protagonist, which I respect, but it comes off as Oz trying to be too cool. Cracking one-liners, being witty, listening to AC/DC and Metallica, giving thongs to his girlfriend and making hot jungle love with her. It comes off as trying too hard, but I understand that might be more a personal thing than anything else.

Any other characters besides Oz are thoroughly uninteresting and don't stick out in any other way. I can say right now that it's an absolute struggle to remember any of their names. I can remember Claire's, but only because she's the only other character in this story who gets any sort of meaningful focus, even if it doesn't fall out of the range of “obvious love interest later turned obvious family baggage for main character.” I get that the book is written from Oz's perspective, but when I can tell exactly what kind of shallow role a character is going to play just from Oz's shallow and blunt narration, it makes it harder to remember or care about them. I can say right now that Natalie's death registered very little reaction from me, something I share in common with Oz (yeah, Oz. Just a witty quote and then barely think about her afterwards. But I guess that's good, now that your Modern Ware 2 playing, high-libido, beer-drinking, one-of-the-guys neuroscience-studying girlfriend is dead, it lets you quickly move onto your second girlfriend). I guess I remember the chimpanzee. Maybe for not the right reasons. But hey, I understand that in this kind of book, it's not meant to slow down and give any kind of focus on any of the characters. Still, it would've been nice to see other written characters that weren't just walking cardboard cutouts for the story or obvious tropes that are only meant to be baggage.

Now, the last thing, and the thing where it all falls apart for me. The execution of the plot and characters, or I suppose the writing itself. Okay, I get it. This is no Jurassic Park. This is no Relic. This isn't supposed to be some deeply researched, deeply thought-provoking, multi-layered story. And I like I said before, that's 100% okay and there's nothing wrong with that. But at the same time, I like for things to still be cohesive and logical, for things to still make sense to the reader. Things that characters do and say can be utterly confusing from a reader's perspective with little to no explanation, and you just have to connect the dots yourself. And I think this is greatly illustrated in Attila, the book's chimpanzee character. So, we know Oz. He's a fringe scientist who's desperately researching the phenomena of animals attacking humans, trying his best to convince people of the danger they're finding themselves facing. He's obviously very committed to this, spending all of his money traveling to different countries to research it, risking his romantic relationship, dropping out of school to pursue it...

...so why the hell would a guy like this have a pet chimpanzee in his apartment???

Why? That literally makes no sense whatsoever. And there's no explanation for it at all. There's never a “this chimpanzee will save the humans from animals,” “this chimpanzee is different from the animals,” or even “i'm keeping it as an experiment to study animal attacks, let me sic him on the entire apartment complex.” I don't need to go into details of how chimpanzees are extremely dangerous without an apocalyptic animal attack scenario going on, especially a male chimpanzee cooped up in an apartment complex in an unfamiliar setting. And Oz is shocked and surprised when this chimpanzee goes ballistic and kills and eats his girlfriend? How is the reader supposed to take any of that seriously? I do recall that Oz briefly thinks something to the effect of “Oh damn, maybe that wasn't such a good idea. I messed up on that call.” Uh, yeah. You think, buddy? You need to use all two of your brain cells to figure that out? For being the only scientist in the world who can figure out the animal attack phenomena, he sure doesn't seem all that intelligent. I get this is a book that is meant to stretch your suspension of disbelief, and I accept that, but things should still make at least a tiny bit of sense.

There's more examples, but this review is getting way too long and I think I need to stop. All in all, Zoo's nothing more than one of those shallow thrillers that get you through a long airplane ride. And if that's all you're looking for, great. That's all this books really is. But think about anything past a shallow level, and it falls apart and becomes that much more flawed.

If Oz is the kind of hero who will save our world, maybe our world deserves to be doomed.

(Interesting little side note, I just want to say that my friend who is majoring in biology looked at the explanations for why the animals are becoming more aggressive, and laughed at it a bit. I don't understand biology at all, so the scientific explanations were okay to me, but she saw the explanations given about hydrocarbons and animal pheromones and thought it was funny. I'm not holding it against the book at all, since it's obviously just a fictional book and not meant to be taken super seriously or be super realistic. Just thought I'd point it out as a little P.S. to my review.)

Rating: 3.25 stars.
_______

Should have been called “Exposition Dump: The Novel.”

This is one of those books that had a stellar premise but was unfortunately marred by subpar execution.

A woman, Myfawny, wakes up in a park with absolutely no memory of who she is and is only guided by letters written by herself from before she was saddled with her amnesia. As it turns out, she's a person of significant supernatural ability in a secret organization whose job is to protect the world from supernatural phenomena while also keeping them secret from the general populous. The basis of this premise has been used many times before, but it's an appealing facet of worldbuilding that's led to many successful and endearing properties before.

The main issue is that this kind of setup requires a lot of knowledge to be passed onto the reader so that they know what's going on. And this leads to now of the trickiest parts of writing...exposition. Sometimes, the only way to give readers the knowledge they need about the world in your story is just through telling them in prose. And if it's written in a genuinely engaging way, I usually don't mind. In fact, I think learning about an interesting world can be fun.

In this book, it is not fun. Much of the exposition we are given through Myfawny's letters from before she got amnesia. It's a very cool setup that's dampened by the fact that these letters go on for pages. They make up entire chapters in some cases. The letters that detail was Myfawny was doing before she got amnesia and are tied to the plot are kind of interesting, at least. But half of them are just info-drops on certain individuals, about the Chequey organization, things like that that aren't connected to the plot. It brings the story to a grinding, uninteresting halt. And it's a shame because I already think the book has pacing issues, where it feels like the plot plods along in the early-mid section of the book before suddenly ramping up around the 60% mark, and then slowing down in favor of a subplot of introducing another character to Myfawny before ramping up once more around the 80% mark.

It also doesn't help that Myfawny in general is one of those clever and snarky protagonists. She always quipping about things, likes to make nonchalant comments in tense situations, and has skewed priorities (asking for coffee during important operations). These kinds of characters, I find, are very hard to write well. I've only seen them pulled off a handful of times. Most of the time, they're just incredibly annoying and also hurt the atmosphere in a book. How am I supposed to take anything seriously in this book when the character doesn't themselves? How am I supposed to find weight in anything that happens in the story when the character is treating it like a big inconvenience?

It's really too bad because there are some really cool concepts in here. Some of the characters, like Gestalt, were a fascinating character concept that I thought was interesting to see fleshed out. The main villains of the book (no spoilers) had some great, visceral descriptions going for them. Ingrid was cool. Alrich was also kind of cool. There was one part in the book that got a genuine chuckle out of me and I thought was kind of legitimately clever and not the artificial cleverness the book tries to make us think (won't put details because of spoilers).The last part of the book where the plot ramps up did kind of have me hooked and I read through it pretty fast.

This book has a sequel, which makes sense considering how the book ended. Too bad I'm not interested in continuing.