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Half the Day is Night
 
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Half the Day is Night (Paperback)

by Maureen F McHugh (Author)
1.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)

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Product details

  • Paperback: 352 pages
  • Publisher: Little, Brown; New edition edition (7 Oct 1999)
  • Language English
  • ISBN-10: 185723863X
  • ISBN-13: 978-1857238631
  • Product Dimensions: 17.4 x 10.8 x 2.6 cm
  • Average Customer Review: 1.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
  • Amazon.co.uk Sales Rank: 1,387,364 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Product Description

Amazon.co.uk Review

Here's the second novel from an author whose first, the 1992 China Mountain Zhang, was widely acclaimed in sf circles. In contrast to the earlier book's world-spanning jaunts, this one offers a tight, tight focus on a claustrophobic setting--Caribe, a deep-sea habitat far beneath the Caribbean, where the sun doesn't reach and all the lighting is artificial. So is a great deal of habitat life, which is full of sharp details like the need to give yourself an artificial fever with "pyroxin" to maintain body warmth when scuba-fishing in the chill waters outside. McHugh's lead characters are both distrusted misfits who are at risk in this high-tech segment of the Third World: a male French-Vietnamese mercenary and the female Chinese-American banker who takes him on as a needed bodyguard. Tension steadily increases through financial shenanigans, terrorist intervention, scapegoat-hunting local police, sudden gunfire, and explosive sabotage. Ultimately, this seabed pressure-vessel called Caribe is a huge sealed trap for outsiders, who end up on the run, stripped of their exit visas, all the options closing down except the remote hope of making a break for it. The story squeezes harder and harder until the satisfyingly understated finale. Not a flashy novel, but a good one. --David Langford


WASHINGTON POST

'A nearly perfect work'

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2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars tedious, deadly dull, simply awful at enormous length, 1 Dec 1999
By A Customer
Expect nothing like "China Mountain", McHugh's much better previous work where intersting people did things and grew as a result. Style, creativity, and excitment have all been sacrificed. The theme here is claustrophbia--you as reader feel trapped in a novel that never seems to end, and, more depressingly, nothing ever seems to happen. The heroine, a young woman banker, seems to spend hundreds of pages feeling about her feelings, first here, then there, and always thousands of feet under water in eternal night. The story line--corporate takeovers, mercenaries, etc. is barely wallpaper to page after page of how she feels--trapped, isolated, alone, surrounded by uncaring people, and all of it thousands of feet below the sea in eternal darkness (do you see a theme here?), and then we do it all over again some more. I certainly felt trapped, and after just one chapter, let alone dozens. Most importantly, unlike the protagonist in "China Mountain" this character does not grow, she simply reacts, and feels, and is trapped, and... You get the point, nothing happens, there is no one to care about, and you can achieve the same effect for much less by calling up the most depressing and ineffectual person you know and offering to spend two weeks trapped with them in a stalled elevator.
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