mikerickson reviewed The Revenant by Michael Punke
Review of 'The Revenant' on 'Goodreads'
2 stars
Oh wow. What an unenjoyable experience this was. And that's not coming from a place of squeamishness or discomfort reading this kind of brutal and extreme wilderness survival; I've seen this done before (and done better). No, this is more about the fact that this book was pitched as gripping tale of revenge and instead I get a protagonist who is not only one-dimensional and unlikeable but also kind of overreacting to the slight he suffered. When I found myself routinely hoping he would fail to achieve his desired comeuppance and find myself liking the main offender I'm meant to be rooting against, something's gone wrong.
The writing itself is serviceable. The third-person omniscient narration was a little disorienting the first time you learn about multiple different characters' unvoiced opinions in the same paragraph, but I quickly got used to it. The dialogue, what little there is of it, also …
Oh wow. What an unenjoyable experience this was. And that's not coming from a place of squeamishness or discomfort reading this kind of brutal and extreme wilderness survival; I've seen this done before (and done better). No, this is more about the fact that this book was pitched as gripping tale of revenge and instead I get a protagonist who is not only one-dimensional and unlikeable but also kind of overreacting to the slight he suffered. When I found myself routinely hoping he would fail to achieve his desired comeuppance and find myself liking the main offender I'm meant to be rooting against, something's gone wrong.
The writing itself is serviceable. The third-person omniscient narration was a little disorienting the first time you learn about multiple different characters' unvoiced opinions in the same paragraph, but I quickly got used to it. The dialogue, what little there is of it, also flowed logically, and the chapters were in nice concise chunks. I also appreciated the date markers given at the beginning of each chapter to help give a sense of how much time was passing. And I even liked most of the supporting cast, and there's a lot of them that cycle through this plot.
The bones of this book were fine, it was the main character that sucked the life out of it for me. I'm not expecting a wild, grizzly (hyuck), mountain man to be the most charismatic guy, but calling him a cardboard cutout would be a disservice to cardboard cutouts everywhere. I didn't realize until after I finished that Hugh Glass was an actual man who did go through the inciting event of this book, but after seeing this rendition of his tale, I'm not sure that this was a story that needed to be told. I saw in other reviews that the anti-climactic ending was a letdown, but I contest that; to me, the fact that this story didn't end the way I thought it would was its only saving grace.
I try to end reviews with who I would recommend this book to, but honestly if you wanted a nineteenth-century wilderness survival with graphic depictions of man-vs-nature scenarios, this doesn't even enter my top three.
