{"id":9161,"date":"2021-08-05T07:00:00","date_gmt":"2021-08-05T11:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=9161"},"modified":"2021-08-04T21:59:16","modified_gmt":"2021-08-05T01:59:16","slug":"disappointed-expectations","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=9161","title":{"rendered":"Disappointed Expectations"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

You may have noticed that the book reviews on this website tend toward the positive. I decided a few months ago to post reviews here of only those books I could recommend. I\u2019m choosy about what I read in the first place, but if a book doesn\u2019t meet expectations, OK. What\u2019s the point of giving a tepid review to a book that probably won\u2019t ever come to the notice of most readers? Let those authors have their shot. Tastes differ.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Two books I\u2019ve read lately are exceptions. Both are receiving a healthy dose of publicity\u2014one because the author is popular and the other, a debut, because the publisher has put big bucks behind it. So these books may actually may attract your attention. Here\u2019s what troubled me about them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Hollows<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

Mark Edwards is a popular British thriller writer. He set this story at a family camp in Maine\u2014remote, wooded. A grisly double murder occurred there twenty years earlier, and the local teenager thought to have committed the crime disappears and isn\u2019t seen again. When British journalist Tom and his teenage daughter arrive for a getaway, they learn right away about the killings and that many of the camp\u2019s visitors are murder-porn tourists. Creepy events ensue. Is the place haunted, has the killer been living in the woods all this time, why are people warning them to leave? Of course, they don\u2019t take any of this good advice (or there wouldn\u2019t be a story), but Tom\u2019s second-guessing and the predictable plot become tiresome.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Falling<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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TJ Newman\u2019s debut thriller is an exciting read, so much so (especially for us formerly-frequent flyers) that it may distract you from the plot\u2019s implausibility. But after you close the book, the head-scratching will begin. Newman is a former flight attendant and captures the technical aspects of commercial flight very persuasively and her flight attendant characters are nicely three-dimensional. In a nutshell, a transcontinental passenger airline is hijacked and the pilot is told he must crash the plane when it reaches New York. If he refuses, his kidnapped wife and children will be killed. But aside from the behavioral clich\u00e9s in the story, the bad guys\u2019 plot is way way more complicated than it needed to be. Ultimately, it makes no sense. (I won\u2019t say why in case you decide to give it a go.) There\u2019s a lot of feel-good stuff near the end that doesn\u2019t hold up either. This book has already been optioned for film and has Hollywood fakery written all over it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

You may have noticed that the book reviews on this website tend toward the positive. I decided a few months ago to post reviews here of only those books I could recommend. I\u2019m choosy about what I read in the … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"Disappointed Expectations - One book that doesn't live up to the author's reputation and another that doesn't justify the hype. Wanted to like both.","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[52,1160,126,66,32],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9161","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-crime","category-horror","category-reading-2","category-suspense","category-thriller"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2NkiT-2nL","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9161","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=9161"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9161\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9164,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9161\/revisions\/9164"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9161"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9161"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9161"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}