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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
The lost Jurassic Park, 17 Jun 2009
Customer review from the Amazon Vine™ Programme (What's this?)
With a strapline which essentially covers the whole ethos of this book, 'A Jurassic Park for the Lost generation' you certainly know what to expect. And you get it - in hordes of man-eaters, swarms of ditto and, frankly, with more than half an eye on the blockbuster film, a gripping yet not unexpected grand finale and a meeting of minds/bodies for our two hero characters.
It is formulaic, hence my four stars but it is very well written and the author seems to well understand how to create a scientific explanation for his creatures. Whether it works so well when villains (a villain, really) and terrorist threats loom into the picture it a moot point.
But if you like gore and action and gore and beasts and gore and...well, you catch the mood of most of the book, this one should be right up your jungle trail.
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20 of 23 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Jurassic Park for the Primeval Generation..., 12 May 2009
Customer review from the Amazon Vine™ Programme (What's this?)
`Fragment' by Warren Fahy has been dubbed "Jurassic Park for the Lost Generation" - I'm not quite sure what that's supposed to mean but I can see various similarities between the three and it also made me really look forward to reading this book.
It begins when a reality TV show called SeaLife responds to a distress call on an previously un-explored island thousands of miles away from anywhere. The cast and crew of the show get there and all hell breaks loose as life on the island has evolved completely separately from the rest of the world and are a lot more advanced - not to mention vicious - than anything else on Earth. It is then up to the President of the United States with the help of some of the best scientists to decide the fate of Henders Island and its occupants.
This is a pretty trashy read - it was definitely written with Hollywood in mind (I'll be very surprised if there isn't a film version soon) and therefore is very easy to follow with lots of action and is incredibly fast paced. When I first started this I literally couldn't put it down, I was hooked. The idea of being on an island that no one has explored before with creatures beyond our imagination is great as the possibilities are endless. Fahy obviously spent a lot of time thinking up the creatures as some of the descriptions are so detailed and in depth that you'd think that it was a real animal he was talking about.
Despite being a bit of a dumbed-down Jurassic Park with characters that had possibly the most stupid names I can remember (Zero, Peach and Angel - what was he thinking!?) up until about page 350 I would have easily given this book a 5 star review - it was fantastic. Without spoiling it for anyone who's yet to read it, it goes completely off track to the point where it is just ridiculous after this and completely ruins what otherwise would have been an excellent debut novel. I was so disappointed that it turned out the way it did but if there ever was a missed opportunity at being amazing, this is it.
Overall this started off as a brilliant adventure novel that I was thoroughly enjoying and ended up being completely awful because of the stupid ending. Why Fahy decided to go this way is beyond me as he was onto a winner so all I can say really is if you're reading this and enjoying it, you are likely to be heavily disappointed by the end.
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16 of 19 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
A travesty , 3 May 2009
Customer review from the Amazon Vine™ Programme (What's this?)
Well the first thing I would take issue with is the tag-line "Jurassic Park meets Lost". I am a huge fan of both Lost and the Jurassic Park book and whilst I can see the slight comparison with the book I don't really get the Lost link. Yes it is on an island with weird creatures, but isn't that just Jurassic Park?
As for the comparisons to Jurassic Park, it is frankly a travesty for anyone to see this in the same class as Crichton. Yes Crichton mixes action with science and all that but there is a major difference, Crichton is actually a good writer.
This had a decent premise which in the hands of someone who could actually write would have made an awesome story able to rival the best out there, however, from the moment I started reading I was horrified at the terrible writing.
The imagery is so appalling I am amazed that the editors did not ensure sections were re-written. There were times when the imagery and comparisons made no sense and some were so random it seemed the author just guessed at what a simile was. The descriptive passages are also poor with creatures etc lacking any real detail. Whilst I realise that the whole point was to give the flora/fauna an alien appearance, you surely have to draw the line somewhere and after finishing the novel I still wasn't sure what half the animals even looked like. It was only at the end of the book that I discovered the inclusion of a couple of pictures of a couple of the animals. Unfortunately these were completely different from the images the author had managed to describe. I have read my fair share of fantasy and science fiction novels, some good, some bad, and most leave me with an understanding of what the characters, monsters etc look like but this author seems to think mundane things such as this irrelevant to his story.
As for characterisation, there simply isn't any, the main characters (and I use that phrase very loosely) were one-dimensional at best and the other "characters" were even worse. I was constantly waiting to find some sort of connection with any of the characters but even at the end I really didn't care what happened to any of them. As for the `bad-guy', it was blatantly obvious what he was going to do from the off-set which ruined any chance of building suspense and making the story even remotely interesting. Normally when I read I find some characters annoying, some funny etc but for the first time since I started reading I can honestly say that I really have no opinion about any of the characters from this novel simply because I don't even remember most of them.
The opening of the book reads like a child had written it and the ending is truly atrocious. Throughout the book you are treated to cliché after cliché almost as if the author had a "dummies guide to writing a novel" next to him and even then he appears to have skipped a few fundamental chapters. It was also lost in its own theorising for significant sections which both distracted from the main story of the novel and reduced a poor read into a boring one. I am all for scientific and philosophical inclusion in books, but it surely can't be a good sign when at the end of the book you actually end up agreeing with the "bad-guy".
From a great premise with huge potential this book lacks any depth with desperately poor description and imagery. There is little to no characterisation and I was not only left with no empathy for any of the characters but often hoping for them to befall some grizzly death just to end the book quicker. I really hope the publishers manage to get this sorted but I can honestly say that if this is the level of writing they are happy with then it is frankly a shocking indictment of their standards. I fail to understand how anyone could have actually enjoyed this and I can honestly say that if it was a choice of reading this book again or being eaten alive by Crichton's dinosaurs, the latter would definitely be my choice as it would undoubtedly be less painful!
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