The dead lands

One of the worst endings I've ever read in a book. He spent 380 pages building up an interesting story, then quickly killed off three of the main characters with little fanfare to tie it in with another plot point that makes no sense for the last 20 pages. Really disappointed, considering that the rest of the book was enjoyable.

This was a really interesting mix of a post-apocalypse survival story and a quest story with some elements of fantasy thrown in.

Like the author, I grew up pretty close to some of the places visited by the Lewis and Clark expedition, and so the remixing of that familiar tale really worked for me. If you're looking for a brand new story, this might not work for you, but if you're up for an old familiar story told in a completely new way, it's great.

This went from one of my most anticipated reads of the summer to what will surely be one of the summer's biggest disappoints. The novel mixes post-apocalyptic dystopian realism with what I guess would be considered aspects of weird fiction, and although I normally love mixing and blending of genres, it doesn't work for me here. All of the weird stuff (telekinesis, controlling animals, bat boys) is all explained away by the presence of radiation which contributes to accelerated evolution. And that explantion gets repeated so often throughout the novel (or at least to me it seemed to) that it begins sounding more like an excuse.

The novel also makes use of multiple-perspective, which, again, I generally enjoy. But sometimes the perspective changes mid-chapter, which bothered me. I know that multiple-perspectives doesn't always have to work in the one narrator to a chapter model of Game of Thrones or Faulkner, but I got frustrated by the perspectives shifting without the closure of the ending of a chapter. And since the narrative perspectives often lack closure, the books seems to drag, as if we're slowly plodding along from St. Louis to Oregon with the characters. I know Benjamin Percy is a good writer. I've enjoyed his writing in the past. But I'm just not feeling it with this one.