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joshperna 's review for:
City on Fire
by Don Winslow
"Some poor kids from some shitty British slum have no other choice than enlisting in the army... and getting killed by a long-range bullet shot by a guy they never see. For what? A change of flags? Meet the new boss, same as the old boss."
Hate to start the year on such a flaccid note. I'm at a loss looking at the near-universal praise of this book. While the structure and pacing of the book is well constructed, it was completely overrun with cliches, mob tropes, and corny dialogue coming out of one-dimensional characters I didn't care all that much about. The escalation of the mob war kept my attention, but it slowly started to peter out into an overly-convoluted denouement with too many disparate things happening to too many characters.
The book's story concluded but how things ended for the protagonist rang sort of hollow and non-committal... before I realized the author intended to make a NYT-best-selling-trilogy out of this character like some Jack Reacher or Jason Bourne property. Really took the fangs out of this book since the character was so innately rooted in a New England, blue-collar setting where he spent his entire life; to see him skip off to the next serialized adventure knocked this book from a 3 star to a 2 star.
Hate to start the year on such a flaccid note. I'm at a loss looking at the near-universal praise of this book. While the structure and pacing of the book is well constructed, it was completely overrun with cliches, mob tropes, and corny dialogue coming out of one-dimensional characters I didn't care all that much about. The escalation of the mob war kept my attention, but it slowly started to peter out into an overly-convoluted denouement with too many disparate things happening to too many characters.
The book's story concluded but how things ended for the protagonist rang sort of hollow and non-committal... before I realized the author intended to make a NYT-best-selling-trilogy out of this character like some Jack Reacher or Jason Bourne property. Really took the fangs out of this book since the character was so innately rooted in a New England, blue-collar setting where he spent his entire life; to see him skip off to the next serialized adventure knocked this book from a 3 star to a 2 star.