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The Truth About Sharks And Pigeons (2011)

by Matt Phillips(Favorite Author)

3.21 of 5 Votes: 2

languge

English

genre

Science Fiction

publisher

Gorilla Books

review 1: Meh. I really wanted to love it, and it sounded like something I should enjoy. Pigeons in a clear British Secret Service setting, James Bond villain loving sharks who model their world domination plans off Bond movies. Physicist sheep with highly advanced medical knowledge, what is there not to love?Everything else. There were numerous typos, and few plot surprises. As the book goes on, the author takes great pains to point out already glaringly obvious details that will turn out to be important later. The ending was also not particularly good- rather than actually wrapping things up, it attempts to show how the character is a far more pulled together person than the rest of the story indicates. It had fun moments, and for all its faults, I never once considered putting it... more down to read something else instead. The "bonus" material at the end is largely horrible. The alternate endings were particularly bad, but the "deleted scenes" were rubbish as well. Leaving them out entirely and pretending they were never written would have been a better choice.
review 2: The good: The sheep, the "DVD Extras" at the back of the bookThe bad:The book was OK but would really benefit from a professional editor to weed out the worst of the distractions, e.g:* typos, using the wrong homophone (passed v past), inconsistently referring to characters (e.g. referring to a character by surname for an entire book and then suddenly switching to their first name for a while before returning to their surname), the inevitable made-up words that fantasy authors just love to force into a book whether they're needed or not.* explaining really obvious jokes, and not in a funny way. Seriously, if you have a weapon which comes in a can and its acronym is WUPASS then having the character hold it up and announce that he's going to open a can of wupass because he's always wanted to use that phrase (even though earlier he acted like he'd never heard the phrase before) is just awful writing.* inconsistent protagonist characterisation - is he a sheltered child or a grown man who has actually seen an action movie? He alternates between having the usual amount of action movie knowledge, and being unbelievably slow: e.g. he looks at a can of "WUPASS" and thinks it's food but later uses the phrase "open a can of wupass" (you know, in case we didn't get the joke). He then looks at a bomb timer counting down and thinks it's a broken alarm clock. He picked both of these items up in an armory, though he did conveniently forget that so that he could hilariously mis-identify the objects later.Definitely don't read it expecting Douglas Adams. A young self-published Tom Holt, maybe. less

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