Moon and Music
Nov. 7th, 2019 10:21 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
alobearI pre-ordered the audio version of the latest Jack Reacher book (Blue Moon) by Lee Child as soon as I saw the posters a couple of months ago, and it jumped straight to the top of my listening list this week when it appeared on my phone. It's the 24th Reacher book and I've listened to them all in the six and a half years since I first discovered them. The last one was a big disappointment, so I was a bit apprehensive going in to this one, but I needn't have worried. At least for the first half, Blue Moon is classic Reacher at his best.
Reacher steps off a random bus straight into the middle of bad things going on and he decides to stand up for the little guy. He then meets an attractive woman and has sex with her within hours, and together they fight crime. All in the gravelly, very slightly amused tones of Jeff Harding. What more could a girl want on her daily commute?
In this instance of the familiar structure, Reacher is helping an old couple who have got themselves into trouble borrowing money from the Albanian mob, in order to pay their daughter's medical expenses. There's lot of running around, mistaken identity, bad guys being very confused about how one man can cause quite so much trouble, people being stuffed in trunks, etc, etc.
I really liked Abi, the waitress who saves Reacher from enemy pursuit and subsequently becomes his sidekick. I also liked Maria and Aaron, the old couple, who are just trying to get by in difficult circumstances, and the other members of the team who gradually join in along the way.
The plot slowed down considerably in the second half and got a bit repetitive, and there was an awful lot of cold-blooded murder on Reacher's part (which seemed more brutal than usual, though perhaps I'm misremembering). But the climactic frontal assault was exciting and the very end was pretty funny, so overall a solid entry in the Reacher catalogue, and a huge improvement over the last one.
This week, I also read The Lola Quartet by Emily St John Mandel, which was disappointing. I've been looking at her back catalogue after enjoying Station Eleven again earlier in the year, but I didn't really enjoy this one that much. It's a thriller about a man whose high school girlfriend disappeared ten years before. He discovers she had his baby and that she and the child may now be in danger. The story builds up, following Gavin in his attempts to track down his daughter, interspersed with pieces of what happened ten years before. My basic problem was that I didn't like Gavin at all, so I wasn't invested in his quest. Plus, the story as it unfolded wasn't as compelling as I'd hoped, and also didn't really go anywhere in the end. There was an attempt at an interesting moral discussion after the climax but then it was just abandoned, so I was left feeling as though the story had been underserved. It's certainly not badly written, but it just didn't really engage me.
Reacher steps off a random bus straight into the middle of bad things going on and he decides to stand up for the little guy. He then meets an attractive woman and has sex with her within hours, and together they fight crime. All in the gravelly, very slightly amused tones of Jeff Harding. What more could a girl want on her daily commute?
In this instance of the familiar structure, Reacher is helping an old couple who have got themselves into trouble borrowing money from the Albanian mob, in order to pay their daughter's medical expenses. There's lot of running around, mistaken identity, bad guys being very confused about how one man can cause quite so much trouble, people being stuffed in trunks, etc, etc.
I really liked Abi, the waitress who saves Reacher from enemy pursuit and subsequently becomes his sidekick. I also liked Maria and Aaron, the old couple, who are just trying to get by in difficult circumstances, and the other members of the team who gradually join in along the way.
The plot slowed down considerably in the second half and got a bit repetitive, and there was an awful lot of cold-blooded murder on Reacher's part (which seemed more brutal than usual, though perhaps I'm misremembering). But the climactic frontal assault was exciting and the very end was pretty funny, so overall a solid entry in the Reacher catalogue, and a huge improvement over the last one.
This week, I also read The Lola Quartet by Emily St John Mandel, which was disappointing. I've been looking at her back catalogue after enjoying Station Eleven again earlier in the year, but I didn't really enjoy this one that much. It's a thriller about a man whose high school girlfriend disappeared ten years before. He discovers she had his baby and that she and the child may now be in danger. The story builds up, following Gavin in his attempts to track down his daughter, interspersed with pieces of what happened ten years before. My basic problem was that I didn't like Gavin at all, so I wasn't invested in his quest. Plus, the story as it unfolded wasn't as compelling as I'd hoped, and also didn't really go anywhere in the end. There was an attempt at an interesting moral discussion after the climax but then it was just abandoned, so I was left feeling as though the story had been underserved. It's certainly not badly written, but it just didn't really engage me.
