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A review by timinbc
Venomous Lumpsucker by Ned Beauman
3.0
Another reviewer said something to the effect of "this is the most light-hearted book about species extinction that you'll ever see." Yes. That was the problem.
I see a clever wordsmith here, but not a novelist, at least not this time. We have two very drab lead characters, and B dislikes A. That's OK, so did I.
I see a plot that started with a few keystone ideas, led out two leads into difficulty, and then apparently pantsed it from there, wrapping it up hastily when the page count reached target.
The lead-up to the ending was tolerable, I suppose, but I was skipping great gobs of text by that point, because everything has proceeded SO slowly for SO long. And then Ned did that thing to that character, WTF, and then offered us two alternate endings, neither very satisfactory.
Perhaps it's my fault that I didn't grasp what was going on with the spindrifters, because it seemed for a while that they could be more interesting than the title fish.
Also, the computers we were shown for 400 pages were not even a hint of what we got in the last section. Enough that it felt like cheating. As if Karin had said "oh, didn't I tell you I can fly?" as she soared out of the 60-foot pit of spikes and poison.
I fear this book tried to do too many things and ended up doing none of them well.
I see a clever wordsmith here, but not a novelist, at least not this time. We have two very drab lead characters, and B dislikes A. That's OK, so did I.
I see a plot that started with a few keystone ideas, led out two leads into difficulty, and then apparently pantsed it from there, wrapping it up hastily when the page count reached target.
The lead-up to the ending was tolerable, I suppose, but I was skipping great gobs of text by that point, because everything has proceeded SO slowly for SO long. And then Ned did that thing to that character, WTF, and then offered us two alternate endings, neither very satisfactory.
Perhaps it's my fault that I didn't grasp what was going on with the spindrifters, because it seemed for a while that they could be more interesting than the title fish.
Also, the computers we were shown for 400 pages were not even a hint of what we got in the last section. Enough that it felt like cheating. As if Karin had said "oh, didn't I tell you I can fly?" as she soared out of the 60-foot pit of spikes and poison.
I fear this book tried to do too many things and ended up doing none of them well.