driven_by_happy 's review for:

State of Fear by Michael Crichton

3.0

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Michael Crichton knows how to tell a suspenseful story. In previous books like Congo, the Jurassic Park books, and Timeline, he knew how to mix storytelling with hard science without going over board on technology. In "State of Fear" the story is heavily layered with hard science. Not that the topics aren't interesting, but it's that the story gets lost in long drawn out explanations. All of the sudden I was reading a textbook instead of a story. There were sections where a character would explain climate change or the several paragraphs about Yellowstone. This got tedious and dry real fast. I wondered that there must be a point in the explanation to get to the end. Well, I got to the end. Those paragraphs explaining ideas, weather, and eco-organizations were merely there to let the reader be aware of them, but they didn't really do anything for solving the conflict of the story. It took away from the excitement of the actual story. Maybe someone who had zero idea of those things would find the new information exciting, but since I've read and watch documentaries on climate change and National Parks, I found it boring. The other side to "State of Fear" is that the characters travel and face trouble in extreme weather and extreme war zones. If you are sensitive to panic situations, this is probably not the Michael Crichton book for you.