Take a photo of a barcode or cover
A review by cmzukowski
A Vision of Fire by Gillian Anderson
3.0
I went into this book with the intention of not doing what a lot of other readers seemed to do. I was NOT going to think about X-Files and I was NOT going to try to imagine the main character being Dana Scully. I do absolutely adore her and X-Files but I didn’t want to go into this book with any hopes or pre-conceived ideas that would cloud my opinion. I think that is the best way to go into reading this book because if you were expecting Scully you would, of course, be disappointed.
A Vision of Fire wasn’t amazing but it wasn’t awful. It was good, I enjoyed it and at many times I could not put it down. The story held my interest and it involved a lot of intense and creepy moments that kept you going. Unfortunately the book also had its fair share of problems. My first problem (and the thing that probably bugged me the most) was there was NO character development for the main character, Caitlin, or any characters really. So I found it really hard to understand her or really care about her much. I like to get to know the characters I am reading about so they seem like real people. In this case you knew mostly nothing about Caitlin aside from her profession.
I also felt like the story was a little loose. It was a great concept and very interesting but I feel like it was just gone through very quickly. No real in-depth explanations of anything going on and no good background. Also the main character (and almost all the other characters) seemed to believe in the fantastical circumstances and happenings very easily. It is like if you went to someone and said “Aliens exist because I was abducted” and they responded with “Okay that makes sense. I believe you.” I feel like the book would have benefitted from being longer so that there could be more information and more of an internal struggle from the main character as she tried to understand and believe what was going on.
I feel like the story was also resolved rather quickly and it neat steps. Here is the problem, here is what is causing the problem, and here is how I will fix the problem, problem solved. Something like this should have taken way longer to resolve than just several days. I believe that more explanation and more development really would have helped with this story. Like I said before, if the book had been longer I think it would have been better. Overall there was just something with the story that bothered me and I can’t really find the best way to explain it. Maybe that it just seemed rather loosely thrown together. I know it wasn’t but that is just how it felt to me. Everything happened, everything was resolved (so far), no well explained reasoning was given and no real in-depth analysis was done by the main characters. She just kind of learned about everything and understood and solved it. Seemed way too unbelievable for me.
The last thing that bothered me was the dialogue. I felt like the serious and emotional dialogue was well done but any casual conversation dialogue seemed rather fake to me. As I read parts I would think to myself “no one talks to the friends like that”. A friend of mine pointed out that made this could be from the two different authors and maybe that was the case. It just made any casual conversations in the book pretty unbelievable to me.
Okay now that I got out my complaints I will say that I enjoyed the book. Being Gillian Anderson’s first book I think she did a good job. I couldn’t put the book down at most times and I enjoyed the story thoroughly. Yes there were all the things that bothered me but I still had a great time reading the book and I do recommend it because it is entertaining and I think the other books to follow in the saga have promise. I finished wanting to know more of the story and wanting things explained and I look forward to reading the other books. I have read many authors’ debut books and in a lot of cases it is normal for them to suffer a little. I am hopeful that as her writing career progresses her books will improve.
A Vision of Fire wasn’t amazing but it wasn’t awful. It was good, I enjoyed it and at many times I could not put it down. The story held my interest and it involved a lot of intense and creepy moments that kept you going. Unfortunately the book also had its fair share of problems. My first problem (and the thing that probably bugged me the most) was there was NO character development for the main character, Caitlin, or any characters really. So I found it really hard to understand her or really care about her much. I like to get to know the characters I am reading about so they seem like real people. In this case you knew mostly nothing about Caitlin aside from her profession.
I also felt like the story was a little loose. It was a great concept and very interesting but I feel like it was just gone through very quickly. No real in-depth explanations of anything going on and no good background. Also the main character (and almost all the other characters) seemed to believe in the fantastical circumstances and happenings very easily. It is like if you went to someone and said “Aliens exist because I was abducted” and they responded with “Okay that makes sense. I believe you.” I feel like the book would have benefitted from being longer so that there could be more information and more of an internal struggle from the main character as she tried to understand and believe what was going on.
I feel like the story was also resolved rather quickly and it neat steps. Here is the problem, here is what is causing the problem, and here is how I will fix the problem, problem solved. Something like this should have taken way longer to resolve than just several days. I believe that more explanation and more development really would have helped with this story. Like I said before, if the book had been longer I think it would have been better. Overall there was just something with the story that bothered me and I can’t really find the best way to explain it. Maybe that it just seemed rather loosely thrown together. I know it wasn’t but that is just how it felt to me. Everything happened, everything was resolved (so far), no well explained reasoning was given and no real in-depth analysis was done by the main characters. She just kind of learned about everything and understood and solved it. Seemed way too unbelievable for me.
The last thing that bothered me was the dialogue. I felt like the serious and emotional dialogue was well done but any casual conversation dialogue seemed rather fake to me. As I read parts I would think to myself “no one talks to the friends like that”. A friend of mine pointed out that made this could be from the two different authors and maybe that was the case. It just made any casual conversations in the book pretty unbelievable to me.
Okay now that I got out my complaints I will say that I enjoyed the book. Being Gillian Anderson’s first book I think she did a good job. I couldn’t put the book down at most times and I enjoyed the story thoroughly. Yes there were all the things that bothered me but I still had a great time reading the book and I do recommend it because it is entertaining and I think the other books to follow in the saga have promise. I finished wanting to know more of the story and wanting things explained and I look forward to reading the other books. I have read many authors’ debut books and in a lot of cases it is normal for them to suffer a little. I am hopeful that as her writing career progresses her books will improve.