I won this book in a GR giveaway. This has not impacted on my ability to review this book in an honest and critical way.
24/11 - This is fantastic!!!! Can't praise it highly enough. It's like reading a book version of one of my all-time favourite movies, Outbreak, but with much more believable experts than Rene Russo and Dustin Hoffman's characters. I LOVE a good virus outbreak/plague book and this has all the characteristics you want in a great one. It has the fast killing, mysterious disease that uses more than one method of transference, experts that know more than the government or military about the disease and a possibly evil government or military presence that just want to nuke the whole situation instead of working out where the contagion came from and stopping it before resorting to killing the majority of the population to keep themselves safe. Alright, enough reviewing, got to get back to reading. To be continued...
27/11 - In my first review I forgot to compliment the author or publisher, or whoever is in charge of the decision, on their choice of paper for the book. It's a lovely experience to touch the paper as you read the book, it feels silky smooth and nice and thick, not like some books that have much rougher textured paper that if you hold up a single page you can watch the tv through it. In The Doomsday Genie the tension is rachetting up, higher and higher as we (me guessing in my head) attempt to work out who the bad guy is. I have had a few comprehension problems with some of the more complicated gene/virus science, but it's not impacting on my enjoyment of the story. What IS impacting on my enjoyment are the grammar, typos, spelling mistakes and missing words (especially the word 'the' before entities like 'THE' CDC, not just CDC). The flow of my reading is definitely disrupted by sentences like "I guess she was pretty enough to be a model. Hispanic, I'd day." (it should be "I'd say") from page 263-4 or "Kay - it means I can check if humans posses the mutant E gene." from page 269. I looked 'posses' up in the dictionary and it is the plural form of posse (as in a group of people formed by a sheriff in order to search for a criminal). Obviously these are not the only instances of these types of errors, if they were I wouldn't even bother mentioning them, these were just the ones I noticed most recently during last night's reading. I would highly recommend a more thorough editing job for Ryan's next book. To be continued...
29/11 - Inspite (or maybe because) of the fact that the silly little editing errors continued through to the end of the book I sort of got used it and was able to mostly ignore it, except for the occasional grimace at some of the instances. The story was great, very exciting, high tension, lots of believable science that was well explained (although I could have used some diagrams to help me imagine what they were explaining a bit better) and a bad guy who started out attempting to do something good for the world. I wish Ryan had extended the ending a bit more, shown the reader how they fought the plague throughout the wider population in a bit more detail, instead of cutting the story off as soon as the scientists had worked out the solution and one person had been treated. I wanted to read about the clean up of America after such a disaster, how the country recuperated - the crops, the people etc. Despite the aforementioned flaws I still think the story itself deserves the 5 star rating and I would highly recommend it to anyone who enjoyed movies like Outbreak and Contagion.
