henwen 's review for:

A Princess of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs

2.0

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This is...not a good book. It's not the worst book I've read, but John Carter is as Gary Stu as it gets, and when there's no stakes, I can't find any purchase in the characterization. Burroughs certainly had a lot of imagination, but he wasn't a very deft writer. Tars Tarkas and Sola are probably his most interesting characters, but Burroughs doesn't realize this, otherwise he would not have summed up what I thought was the most emotionally significant fight scene with one sentence. 23 words, dude. I also felt that the race politics were strange, but I'm not really invested enough to parse this out. Not nuanced, is about as much as I can muster.