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seeminglyrob 's review for:
Winter of the World
by Ken Follett
Disclaimer: I only got a hundred pages through the book before I had to put it down. That's something I don't do often, but life's too short for bad books.
I used to be a huge fan of Follett. I read everything he wrote (his early stuff was mostly spy novels written with a literary flair), and when I came across Pillars of the Earth in my early 20s, I fell in love with Follett's characters. The prose was always simple, but the story was sweeping, and the characters were incredible.
I'm not sure what happened, whether my tastes as a reader have evolved or Follett succumbed to the pressure of dumbing down the book to appeal to a wider audience. Probably a bit of both.
It can't be too much of the latter, though, because I enjoyed the first of this trilogy. Winter, though, is just too much. Everything is spelled out, nothing is left to the reader, and the dialogue is wholly unbelievable. It's as if Follett is trying to explain World War II to a fifth-grader.
I used to be a huge fan of Follett. I read everything he wrote (his early stuff was mostly spy novels written with a literary flair), and when I came across Pillars of the Earth in my early 20s, I fell in love with Follett's characters. The prose was always simple, but the story was sweeping, and the characters were incredible.
I'm not sure what happened, whether my tastes as a reader have evolved or Follett succumbed to the pressure of dumbing down the book to appeal to a wider audience. Probably a bit of both.
It can't be too much of the latter, though, because I enjoyed the first of this trilogy. Winter, though, is just too much. Everything is spelled out, nothing is left to the reader, and the dialogue is wholly unbelievable. It's as if Follett is trying to explain World War II to a fifth-grader.