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mjs242 's review for:
Cold People
by Tom Rob Smith
Okay beach read.
Not great. Lazy writing. UFOs suddenly appear throughout the sky and everyone — everyone! — feels this way or that way. People fall in love in half-sketched-out ways that seem to exist solely to advance the plot. A creature dies and all of the other creatures suddenly are overcome because one of their own has died and for the first time they know mortality. Despite many of their number having just died, several pages previously.
Psychological depth in the characters is largely missing in action. The ‘show don’t tell’ rule too often gets broken.
Some of the characters are rendered well. Many aren’t.
Errors abound. An American Harvard Medical Student is described as being 20 years old and in her second year, and having shadowed doctors and already learned some practical medicine. But US medical schools are graduate-level (post-grad) programs, not undergraduate (as in UK). She’d be at least 24 or 25. The first three years are largely just book learning.
Her suitcase, she says, is made of aluminium. But for Americans, that word doesn’t exist.
Many characters are empty vessels meant to fulfil plot points. There are some interesting plot twists. But then, for example, crazy numbers of ships get scuttled on the coast of Antarctica, including an aircraft carrier (most of which would be nuclear-powered), and overnight it turns into a place of ecological wonder, with underwater life flourishing. Really? All that oil and diesel and who knows what are suddenly released into the seas upon which everyone depends for food, and life goes merrily on? Or a flotilla of ships is docked to the edge of Antarctica, including a nuclear sub? When edges of the continent have a habit of coming away unexpectedly, and sea ice or freezing?
Much is this book feels like a sketch for what could have been much more. Or the basis for a script, except the characters mostly aren’t believable.
Finally, for a book so hung up on love, its portrayal especially in the end is excruciatingly anodyne.
Not great. Lazy writing. UFOs suddenly appear throughout the sky and everyone — everyone! — feels this way or that way. People fall in love in half-sketched-out ways that seem to exist solely to advance the plot. A creature dies and all of the other creatures suddenly are overcome because one of their own has died and for the first time they know mortality. Despite many of their number having just died, several pages previously.
Psychological depth in the characters is largely missing in action. The ‘show don’t tell’ rule too often gets broken.
Some of the characters are rendered well. Many aren’t.
Errors abound. An American Harvard Medical Student is described as being 20 years old and in her second year, and having shadowed doctors and already learned some practical medicine. But US medical schools are graduate-level (post-grad) programs, not undergraduate (as in UK). She’d be at least 24 or 25. The first three years are largely just book learning.
Her suitcase, she says, is made of aluminium. But for Americans, that word doesn’t exist.
Many characters are empty vessels meant to fulfil plot points. There are some interesting plot twists. But then, for example, crazy numbers of ships get scuttled on the coast of Antarctica, including an aircraft carrier (most of which would be nuclear-powered), and overnight it turns into a place of ecological wonder, with underwater life flourishing. Really? All that oil and diesel and who knows what are suddenly released into the seas upon which everyone depends for food, and life goes merrily on? Or a flotilla of ships is docked to the edge of Antarctica, including a nuclear sub? When edges of the continent have a habit of coming away unexpectedly, and sea ice or freezing?
Much is this book feels like a sketch for what could have been much more. Or the basis for a script, except the characters mostly aren’t believable.
Finally, for a book so hung up on love, its portrayal especially in the end is excruciatingly anodyne.