Atlantis - David Gibbins
22 March 2012
Book 5 of 50
Picked up this book by David Gibbins on a lark. Atlantis has always a held my fancy. In fact anything to do with ancient civilizations and I'm a sucker. I picked up the book as the burb looked interesting.
The plot was really good, but the problem was it got lost in too many technical details. Yes the writer comes from and archeaological background and it shows. A lot of page time is spent on academic and archealogical detail. I have no problems with details but they tend to be too long-winded and often made me lose the plot. I had to go back a few pages and figure out what exactly was happening w.r.t the characters before the technical explaination
IMO this was unnecessary and took focus away from the story structure. Most of the details that Gibbins spent pages on seemed more like a filler in the story to increase the page count that actually counting for anything in the story.
What also got my goat was that Atlantis has been lost for so many centuries and suddenly they find 1 clue and viola within a couple of days they have found the island, the people and have deciphered exactly what went wrong that caused the civilization to disappear. It sounded a bit far fetched to me. Also there are a lot holes w.r.t to the characters. Nothing is mentioned about Jack Howard and Costas friendship except that they were in Intelligence together. Also Howard doesn't really show any qualities that should inspire others.
Mid-way through the story we have a villian coming in with delusions of grandeur. Howard is able to take out the entire group of villians by himself while being shot and bleeding from his wounds makes him look like a Rambo. The book started off as a treasure hunt and from there migrated into the realms of thriller and action/adventure; ultimately doing justice to neither.
So I would rate it 2.5/5 in general. I'm gonna read the next book in the hopes that the author improves his writing style once he's has some experience.
Book 5 of 50
Picked up this book by David Gibbins on a lark. Atlantis has always a held my fancy. In fact anything to do with ancient civilizations and I'm a sucker. I picked up the book as the burb looked interesting.
The plot was really good, but the problem was it got lost in too many technical details. Yes the writer comes from and archeaological background and it shows. A lot of page time is spent on academic and archealogical detail. I have no problems with details but they tend to be too long-winded and often made me lose the plot. I had to go back a few pages and figure out what exactly was happening w.r.t the characters before the technical explaination
IMO this was unnecessary and took focus away from the story structure. Most of the details that Gibbins spent pages on seemed more like a filler in the story to increase the page count that actually counting for anything in the story.
What also got my goat was that Atlantis has been lost for so many centuries and suddenly they find 1 clue and viola within a couple of days they have found the island, the people and have deciphered exactly what went wrong that caused the civilization to disappear. It sounded a bit far fetched to me. Also there are a lot holes w.r.t to the characters. Nothing is mentioned about Jack Howard and Costas friendship except that they were in Intelligence together. Also Howard doesn't really show any qualities that should inspire others.
Mid-way through the story we have a villian coming in with delusions of grandeur. Howard is able to take out the entire group of villians by himself while being shot and bleeding from his wounds makes him look like a Rambo. The book started off as a treasure hunt and from there migrated into the realms of thriller and action/adventure; ultimately doing justice to neither.
So I would rate it 2.5/5 in general. I'm gonna read the next book in the hopes that the author improves his writing style once he's has some experience.
Labels: Book Review
posted by G @ March 25, 2012
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