Jedediah Berry

A decent freshman effort. It has an interesting premise, and a fun alternate reality in the vein of the Eyre Affair.

That being said though, the writing was at times a bit labored, the characters were rather flat, and their motives were often indecipherable.

It's a book about reality, dreams of reality, dreams of dreams of reality, and so on. The rules in each world seemed inconsistent and contrived, at least on first reading. Unfortunately I'll probably never get around to a second one.

And most damning for me anyway, at least in a mystery novel, was that so many of Unwin's deductions just seemed far fetched and unsubstantiated.

Plus: a Mexican standoff? Really?

… (mehr)

Fascinating and surreal, this book put me in mind of the movie Dark City which is a mixture of noir and dream time in which things are not what they seem at first glance.

Charles Unwin, a clerk of the detective agency where he works, inexplicably gets promoted to detective when his detective, Severt(sp?) disappears off the grid. Unwin finds himself thrust into a surreal landscape of several crimes which he'd thought solved but due to some of his own conceits (such as his leaving out the more interesting details of Severt's musings over his cases) were actually not solved at all. It's up to Unwin to untangle the dreams of others, his own case files and the strange clues he's given by a variety of interesting people along the way to solve this riddle and get his old job back.

I like the feel of the story. The constant rain, the sense of shades of gray, Unwin's prized bicycle and umbrella, his habits and curiosity are so well described, you feel as if you're within the book itself. The structure of the book is more like a dream itself, with everything out of synch and not following any particular timeline. While this may seem confusing at first, the further into the story, the more sense it makes. It's well worth the time to puzzle your way through with Charles Unwin.… (mehr)