It Was Poorly Written.....

..... and yet I finished all 356 pages.

The book would have been much better at 250 pages.  In the afterward, the author credits those who trimmed the manuscript down from 1000 pages.  I wish an editor had told him that not every noun in a sentence needs two adjectives to tell the reader what she could surmise from the context.

That's how they teach kids Reading Comprehension.  Was Baker anxious? can usually be answered by examining the surrounding paragraph.  It doesn't require the author to use up all the synonyms in Roget's Thesaurus.  That's just insulting.

And it makes the book very tiring to read.  If my mind isn't picturing the scene, all the adverbs in the land can't bring me there.  If the story is interrupted by endless, unnecessary descriptive words, the plot falls by the wayside.

And that's where I got stuck.  The story was compelling.  I wanted to know what happened next.  Plowing through lightly edited text just got in the way.  By page 150 I was ready to break out my red pencil and start crossing things out.  I found myself taking random cat naps with the open book in my lap.

The introduction of an absurd backstory, and then another piled on top of that one, and the gullibility upon which so much of the action is based, had me shaking my head in disbelief.  But the main thread still held my interest, and so, I read on.

Right before the end, there's a paragraph that explains the entire, intricate, overlapping plot.  At least I think it explained it all.  By that point I was no longer able to keep the good guys separated from the bad guys from the guys with bad aliases.  Who did what to whom had gotten swallowed up somewhere around page 275.

Alternative histories have never been my favorite genre.  They provide an easy out for complicated situations.  It's easy to get sloppy, to turn to caricature, to rely on the shock that he could be portrayed as a bad guy.  It's the jump-out-of-the-closet scary movie trick.  I don't like it on film and I don't like it in fiction.  It's cheap.

There were a couple of beautiful paragraphs.  The overarching premise showed promise.  But the author is not as profound as he thinks he is.  His how to think about the Holocaust defined cringeworthy - in the setting, in the delivery, in the response. 

His last page promises a sequel; the main character really does say you'll be seeing me again.  I will not be reading it.  I can't believe I read this one all the way through.

What was it?  

Beat the Devils by Josh Weiss