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A review by tingletangle
Broken Homes by Ben Aaronovitch
2.0
I like the authors humorous style and I also like the whole idea of cops being magicians. So maybe I will at some point embark on Peter Grant number one. But plunching into this series at #4 is not recommendable.
My rating for this book is low and possibly has something to do with the fact that I have not read the other books on Peter Grant. But not only that. There are a lot of characters and relations in this book that are not introduced until late in their appearance. I find myself asking numerous times 'what? who is that? what is that? '.
In my view a bit unnecessary: I think, e.g. that Abigail is Peters younger sister. But on p. 168 I am still not sure. There are ways in which a writer can disambiguate such issues without boring a reader who already knows. Another example is the court of the Godess of the river Thames - the event is talked about for at least 25 pages without explanation, and only on p 135 there is a small disambiguating passage starting with ' it comes as a surprise to many that the rivers of London have their godesses'. I imagine these 'late' explanations are on purpose, but to me, they come too late. Also, during reading, different events appear unrelated to others in the book, and so the story line seems messy. Moreover, the author uses a lot of acronyms, most are explained but there are so many that it is hard to keep track. Finally, as others have pointed out, if you are not a Brit or a Londoner, some scenes or persons are hard to grasp or imagine. There's of course the possibility of finding these out (google) but I would like to be able to read a book without having to.
All of these things make it (for me) impossible to read the book and enjoy it - instead it feels like too much work. So therefore, I gave up on it, half ways, which is something that happens to me very seldomly.
My rating for this book is low and possibly has something to do with the fact that I have not read the other books on Peter Grant. But not only that. There are a lot of characters and relations in this book that are not introduced until late in their appearance. I find myself asking numerous times 'what? who is that? what is that? '.
In my view a bit unnecessary: I think, e.g. that Abigail is Peters younger sister. But on p. 168 I am still not sure. There are ways in which a writer can disambiguate such issues without boring a reader who already knows. Another example is the court of the Godess of the river Thames - the event is talked about for at least 25 pages without explanation, and only on p 135 there is a small disambiguating passage starting with ' it comes as a surprise to many that the rivers of London have their godesses'. I imagine these 'late' explanations are on purpose, but to me, they come too late. Also, during reading, different events appear unrelated to others in the book, and so the story line seems messy. Moreover, the author uses a lot of acronyms, most are explained but there are so many that it is hard to keep track. Finally, as others have pointed out, if you are not a Brit or a Londoner, some scenes or persons are hard to grasp or imagine. There's of course the possibility of finding these out (google) but I would like to be able to read a book without having to.
All of these things make it (for me) impossible to read the book and enjoy it - instead it feels like too much work. So therefore, I gave up on it, half ways, which is something that happens to me very seldomly.