欧宝娱乐

The first third of the book was generally plodding and lacking in any interesting protagonists (and no, I don't care that the oh-so-clever-writer added in as many famous characters as he could think of, they were still generally annoying). The second third showed much more promise, and was actually really fun, until the very end when everything got awful. Not like The-Empire-Strikes-Back-second-act-as-many-bad-things-happen-as-possible awful, though I think that's what the author was aiming for. Just unneccesary and silly and revolting. Based on that, a quick thumbing of the final third, and the pervasively self-conscious and occasionally completely-annoying prose, I'm done with this one. It had high points. The descriptions of some of the experiments in the first section. The soon-to-be insane Vagabond King. There was even an infrequent well-written paragraph. It appears there is actually quite a lot of story material for a really good book here, but this redition of the plot has abused my trust for far too long.

One last thing. The only "real" female character in the novel is badly written. I mean, it's not like his male characters beyond Jack are well-thought out and consistently imagined. But Eliza is a particularly poorly developed character- confusing and often contradictery, with shifting morals and no real reason behind many of her actions. I don't know if this is one of those "well aren't women just like that, guffaw" things or simply another literary over-extension on the author's part. I do know it was aggrivating, though.