I just finished reading this book, and despite a lot of great reviews as well as a very well timed release, I just did not really enjoy it. I am not really a big novel reader, in fact, the only books I read are classics that I get assigned in school. Perhaps I am used to a more professional tone - i dont know, but there was a lot that really bothered me.
First of all, is it normal for an author to include so much product placement in a book.? I mean for God’s sake, did we really need to know what kind of soft drink Black prefers? (Diet Coke) Or did we really need a detailed account of the sandwich Bennet ate (it even gave the number of the particular sandwich on the restaurant’s menu)? How about all that advertising for AOL, with the “You Got Mail” and the comment of how many e-mails are sent a day, blah blah. Not to mention how every character carried Blackberry communication beepers and what not. Well whether this is common or not in novels nowadays, I really found it distracting and irritating.
As for the actual writing - Rosenberg gave such boring detailed descriptions of every single goddamn character’s life trying to bring the character to life. For one thing, it didn’t work. For another thing, the author did it for every single freakin’ character, from a pilot you meet once, and only once, to literally just about every character introduced.
I remember one line that almost made me put the book down and stop reading altogether now that I am writing this - that line about McCoy with a grape lollipop in her mouth. She is a CIA agent meeting with the president’s panel and she is licking a lollipop. Okay we get the sexual vibes already… it was hard to take the book seriously from this point on.
The books ending was also very unsatisfying. (SPOILERS) I find it odd that the world’s most renowned, notorious terrorists would bother going through that house with guns blasting looking for the Israeli Palestinian reps when all they had to do was blow the thing up with some c4. And especially considering how Rosenberg made these guys out to be so dangerous and have such a long storyline involving them, only to see them fail miserably at their relatively easy mission. I figured these guys would have something to do with the nuke right? And speaking of the nuke, the book is over 350 pages long, yet we only get mention of “The Last Jihad” in the last, what, ten pages? A bigger deal needed to be made of this. As for the very end, it seemed to be cut prematurely. It seemed like such an easy, obvious conclusion that anyone could have predicted just by reading the summary on the back cover.
Ugh, maybe i don’t know much about novels that are being released today since I rarely read anything other than what I am forced to in school, but this was a big waste of time.