Reviews - The Children of Men

1.05k reviews for:

The Children of Men

P.D. James

3.51 AVERAGE

rblunden's review against another edition

4.5

challenging reflective sad tense medium-paced

Plot or Character Driven: A mix

Strong character development: Yes

Loveable characters: Complicated

Diverse cast of characters: Yes

Flaws of characters a main focus: Yes

mzgeee53's review against another edition

3.5

adventurous challenging dark reflective sad tense medium-paced

Plot or Character Driven: A mix

Strong character development: Yes

Loveable characters: Complicated

Diverse cast of characters: No

Flaws of characters a main focus: Yes

crabbybarlow's review against another edition

4.0

Bought this at the Niantic Book Barn with a couple pals, so we could all have a long distance reading club together. my first PD James book, so I had no expectations about her as an author. This struck me as a very British dystopian book - slower, introspective,with a weird sort of humor that occasionally pops up, but suspenseful and scary. Like most shorter things I've been reading and liking lately, I almost want to reread it immediately (but I won't). I really enjoyed it.

kmgugerli's review against another edition

3.0

This took a little while to grip me, and honestly I didn’t really care about what happened until the last 80-100 pages or so, but it did get me in the end. Part of my challenge in getting sucked in is that the main character, Theo, absolutely sucks and is just a miserable, lonely, loathing man - which, ok, is perhaps a commentary on what a crisis like this can do to one’s mentality - but so it was really hard to care at all about what happened to him. His obsession with Julian seemed juvenile and creepy.

But, I gotta say, by the end, it sucked me in. The last half or so of the book is quite suspenseful and exciting and I caught myself gasping a couple of times. I was going to give this 3 stars, but then the way it ended rocked so I’ll tack on another one. The ending was both predictable and surprised me quite a bit, and the slight ambiguity of it really intrigued me. That was well done.

squirrel2_33's review against another edition

4.25

adventurous dark mysterious reflective tense fast-paced

Plot or Character Driven: Plot

Strong character development: Yes

Diverse cast of characters: Yes

A suspenseful, fast read. Well written .

chatterbid's review against another edition

4.0

I think this book has a cleverness that others of this nature don’t share. The premise of the story is that humankind is going to die out and reach a terrible end and the dwindling population will be too elderly and ill-equipped to be able to feed and care for themselves, let alone run a troubled country.

We haven’t reach that terrible point yet. Things are nowhere near as bad as they will inevitably get, people still go on holidays and visit museums and live reasonably normal lives. But the shadow of that dreaded future looms heavily over the remaining people who are falling into a mass depression.

The thing I dislike the most about dystopian books is the lack of hope, but the image of a pregnant woman in the cover and the titling of the two sections in the book allowed me to believe there would be a less-than-awful ending. I dared to hope ?!

tkdgirl83's review against another edition

3.0

I only vaguely remember the film so it is difficult to compare. The story ticked along nicely enough but I never felt compelled to keep reading or truly interested in the story line (possibly this is because I'd already seen the film?). Equally, I didn't feel that it was hard work or I was forcing myself to read it. I didn't believe in e relationships, they felt fake but the story was 'nice enough'