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zephyrsilver 's review for:
Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk
by Ben Fountain
I'd give this maybe a 2.5. I really wanted to like it, and at times I did. But overall, it was disappointing and I just couldn't wait for it to be over.
All of the characters were exactly the same. I mean, I get it, grunts are sort of taught to be like that, but the book had about 6 secondary characters, and I could hardly tell any of them apart. But they all were horn-dogs.
Every other paragraph was about sex. The paragraphs in between was them getting annoyed and bored of people thanking them for their service. We get it, civies don't understand war, and the thanks might get old after a while, but they kept going on and on about it.
The book was very repetitive and very flat. There was no plot. At all. Or character development. It just sort of happened. Sure, it wasn't about the destination, it was about the journey. But there was hardly any journey. They all got drunk, they all acted like morons and wanted to bang every girl that walked by.
And a lot of it was unclear. Something would happen and you wouldn't understand what had happened until after the fact. And sometimes Billy would go on these long philosophical trains of thought that came out of nowhere and I would have to read back to see where on earth it came from.
Yet there were moments I liked. There were times where I felt for the characters and were interested in them. But I didn't get to learn about them, or their struggles. I just learned a tiny bit of back-story as to why Billy is in the Army and why the guys became famous (and even that was muddled until half-way through the book). And then it was just them at the game. That was sort of it.
Overall, disappointed. But it wasn't horrible. Wasn't great either though.
All of the characters were exactly the same. I mean, I get it, grunts are sort of taught to be like that, but the book had about 6 secondary characters, and I could hardly tell any of them apart. But they all were horn-dogs.
Every other paragraph was about sex. The paragraphs in between was them getting annoyed and bored of people thanking them for their service. We get it, civies don't understand war, and the thanks might get old after a while, but they kept going on and on about it.
The book was very repetitive and very flat. There was no plot. At all. Or character development. It just sort of happened. Sure, it wasn't about the destination, it was about the journey. But there was hardly any journey. They all got drunk, they all acted like morons and wanted to bang every girl that walked by.
And a lot of it was unclear. Something would happen and you wouldn't understand what had happened until after the fact. And sometimes Billy would go on these long philosophical trains of thought that came out of nowhere and I would have to read back to see where on earth it came from.
Yet there were moments I liked. There were times where I felt for the characters and were interested in them. But I didn't get to learn about them, or their struggles. I just learned a tiny bit of back-story as to why Billy is in the Army and why the guys became famous (and even that was muddled until half-way through the book). And then it was just them at the game. That was sort of it.
Overall, disappointed. But it wasn't horrible. Wasn't great either though.