Jon Evans (1)Rezensionen

It's hard to believe Evans couldn't find a publisher for this book -- it's such a well-written and engrossing story. But because it was so different and not easily placed into any genre, a well-established author couldn't sell this book.

The story follows Patch, a squirrel of Central Park, on his quest to return home, win a war, save his home, and rescue his mother. What a scrappy little thing! Along the way, he makes some unconventional friends who all have their role to play in Patch's ultimate success.½

A truly exciting adventure, with touches of real sadness and despair. Well written and paced, and over of the pleasantest surprises I've had in recent memory.

A must read for fans of books like Watership Down.

A good political thriller based in Africa

This book is superb ! Think Watership Down and this is the squirrel version. Not the sort of book I would have normally chosen to read, but I read it by recommendation and thoroughly enjoyed it. It really was a page turner (or page clicker if you read it on your Kindle!). It's well written and extraordinarily well observed - the view of the world from a squirrel's perspective is ingenious. Without doubt, you will view squirrels quite differently after reading this. It's crying out for a film version. I am certainly going to read more from this author.

I bought this book on Pixel of Ink yesterday morning (free Kindle book) and I am really enjoying the setting (modern India) and the thriller espionage plot! I will want to read more of his books, for sure.
Just finished it...very exciting and lots of fun to read. I guess I love computer hacker novels. For a book published in 2005 about technology, it was surprisingly current.

I just couldn't get myself interested in this book at all. It was overly descriptive and childish and incredibly boring for me. I didn't get far, and do not regret leaving it unfinished and moving on to something better.

So this is the story of a young squirrel who goes on the best adventure EVER! It starts in, from what I can tell, Central park aka The Center Kingdom. Patch is transported all over New York it seems meeting unforgettable friends and terrible foes. I really enjoy seeing the world from a squirrel's prospective. One of the best parts is figuring out the things he describes because of course he does not know the human names. Heroic to the end this tale has captured my heart.

Evans has written a serviceable thriller that explores the implication of the proliferation of drone technology. The pace of action keeps the book moving, though I frankly lost interest about half way through for a while due to the crises stacking up so closely to one another that my emotional investment waned.

My attention was already tenuous because the role of the technology central to the plot lacked sufficient novelty. For example, are we to really believe that these super smart geeks are that surprised to realize the vulnerabilities created by their cell phones? Furthermore, once their vulnerabilities are realized, it seems odd that these super smart geeks can only solve the problem by throwing their phones away, rather than hacking them to emit different signals.

The first-person narrative grates at points and the numerous typos created a slightly slap-dash feel to the novel. James Kowalski loves to compare HVAC ducts on roofs to alien fungus, but beyond that he doesn't have a very eloquent descriptive streak. The reader receives far too many descriptions of explosions whose attempts to one-up each other in describing how wrenching they are leaves one feeling detached deja vu. Kowalski's thought process and internal monologue are also not particularly interesting - mostly involving statements of the obvious - which begs the question why not just have an omniscient narrator to shepherd readers through the story.

The international globe-trotting nature of the adventure reminds me of Stephenson's latest - Reamde - and fans of Dan Suarez will feel deja vu given the topic of his latest - Kill Decision. Such comparisons are unfair, however, because _Swarm_ does not stack up well against these giants. The geek culture through which the characters of Swarm run is self-consciously full of pop-culture and literary references. The characters are smart, though we are more reminded of this through repeated comments about how smart they are rather than demonstrations of their intellect. Where Cryptonomicon (Stephenson's great paean to geeky culture) has multiple page explication of how a character used Van Eck phreaking to read another's email, Swarm simply tells us that a character hacked the system. Whereas Suarez recombines technology trends to envision truly novel and compelling futures, the technologies that Evans deals with are all deeply familiar to anyone who's been reading Wired for the past three years and he doesn't take them into any novel places.

Such comparisons are unfair, however, because books can be effective without being the greatest examples of their genre. If you're looking for some beach or airplane reading and you've already finished all of Stephenson and Suarez's work, then you could do alot worse than Swarm. It is a serviceable summer blockbuster.

This is the first Jon Evans novel I have read. What an adventure in reading! This book is positively vibrating with intensity and action. If you want a book that you will not want to put down, this is the book for you. The action is constant with occasional breaks where you can catch your breath before again boarding that rollercoaster ride through the pages. I found that with all the switchbacks and turnabouts I was holding my breath. This book spun me around and topsy-turvy with every change in direction. At first I found the narrative bits a bit unsettling, somewhat like watching a TV program with voice-over narration for the blind, but I soon overcame that feeling with the dialogue and action.

The story begins with a somewhat typical girl, Danielle, doing a favour for a friend. She is soon literally fighting for her life and for humanity. Nobody is who they seem, nobody wants to trust anyone else. This book will amaze you in how far the world has actually come in technology, but don’t concern yourself with whether you will understand technobabble; it will usually be explained. I guess you could say technology is one of the heroes. Jon Evans has built a brilliant story which includes the best and worst in people, greed, awareness, and the survival instinct in all of us. It takes us to different countries and in dark places and communities which seem worlds away. I highly recommend this book, it is outstanding in its genre. If it weren’t for the few calm spots in the book, I would have had to read it cover-to-cover in one sitting. In fact, I finished it at 3:00 in the morning. You will not be unaffected.

This is a truly appalling book. I picked it up at Jo'burg's O R Tambo airport as I'm always interested in books about Africa, especially when they are set in locations that I know.

But it's not a book about Africa. It's a thriller about north Americans and Europeans set in an "exotic" African backdrop. A few Africans have bit parts in it. The picture it paints of Africa is overwhelmingly negative, almost a caricature. And it perpetuates the myth that the only hope for Africa is if rich white people come and give aid - in this case a nursing school which our heroine opens in the epilogue.

About the only things I agree with in the book are the author's criticism of aid agencies in general, and that externally orchestrated regime changes aren't the answer to anything.

The Kenyan writer Binyavanga Wainaina recently published an article entitled "How to write about Africa", a tongue-in-cheek or maybe satirical look at books about Africa. Jon Evans's Night of Knives might almost have been written using Wainaina's essay as a guide.

Wainaina's piece can be found at http://www.granta.com/Magazine/92/How-to-Write-About-Africa?view=articleAllPages½

Exciting story. But I especially like this book for its account of the Burning Man Festival, and the way various characters related to the festival in very different ways.
I am also intrigued to find out more about this author, since he comes from my home town...

I picked up this book and from the outset expected a somewhat trashy page-turner of a murder mystery. It was everything I expected and more. While some things were predictably formulaic -- what is a better motivator than the death of "the only woman he ever truly loved"? -- other aspects were refreshingly new. Imagine a murder mystery with a character who is not a private eye, a cop about to retire, or a beautiful criminal psychologist. This story centered around a computer programmer with a yen for travel. His skill set did not include being able to disassemble a Kalashnikov in 20 seconds flat, or knowing which fuse to cut on a bomb, or even stunt driving. Instead, his murder solving skills involved tracing IP addresses to exotic locations and cracking secure sites, not because he has mad hacker skillz but because most internet amateurs are pretty sloppy about security.

The most endearing quality of this book was where it spoke to my people. I remember the restaurants he mentions from San Francisco, I was there during the crash, and I too had friends happily liberated in their unemployment. And while I haven't been to Nepal or Africa, I know the adventure backpacker routine of waking up at four to travel to the next destination, the pleasure of spending 24 hours a day with strangers you only recently met, the recurrence of fellow travellers along a route mapped out by Lonely Planet, the pride felt when you discover something good that's not mentioned by the Book. It reminded me of all my travels and my friends travels and my days in techno-geek San Fran.

The reactions of the lead character were also well-written. He often did something really quite stupid (race out to follow a murderer, track him down at night) but understandable from his point of view. And Evans had the courtesy to make him believably weak at times. He doesn't win over a muscle-bound psychopath through physical feats, he does so through subterfuge and luck. At times the book read too much like a pissing contest between the adventuresome hero and the evildoer, each thumbing their noses at each other and engaging in taunts, but there was enough to speak for the book that I didn't mind the overflowing testosterone too much.

Would I recommend this book? Sure. I certainly couldn't put it down, and it's always nice to be reminded that such books exist. Is it the best-written novel ever? Certainly not. But the meat of the book is written from experience, and that gives me real hope for Evans other books.

In this book Paul Wood finds himself traveling in Sarajevo with his girlfriend when they meet up with her old high school buddy, now a battered wife in a relationship with brutal man. In order to get her out of the country they team up with smugglers, and so it begins.

Like Evans' first book, Dark Places, the characters are given pleasantly realistic reactions. When they are approached by gangs they don't yell "Yippee-kay-yay" and fly through the air with guns blazing, they run. Paul Wood thinks twice, thrice, many times about how to deal with the war criminals/drug smugglers/etc. When he hurts, he hurts, and he doesn't do a double-lux flying kick immediately after being punched.

In general it's an entertaining quick read, but I didn't enjoy it quite as much as the first. Paul spends most of the first half in self-pity, afraid to lose his girlfriend because he's become a lazy jobless bum (due to the dotcom crash). He whines and accuses and generally is pitiable, which doesn't lend much charisma to his character. In the end, there is something else that made me uneasy. In Dark Places a group of friends team up to kill one serial murderer who was out to kill them. Blood Price involves killing several characters, one of whom was made more or less agreeable early on. Our heroes agree that simply killing them in their sleep is uncool, but apparently blowing them out of the sky as they lift off in a helicopter is perfectly fine. Given the right means, the end didn't really give them a second thought.

Adventure/spy/mystery novels generally don't worry too much about the consequences. Like any summer blockbuster, they don't spend too much time counting bodies. But Evans goes to such a great extent to make our heroes real, that I end up holding them to a higher moral standard than James Bond. It bugs me that they can kill and drink beer afterward, even when the dead were already established as evil murderous drug runners. It probably shouldn't bother me given the genre, and indeed this book still had a lot of entertaining chase scenes which add an exciting edge. I'll pick up his next book Invisible Armies sometime, but I won't set my bar too high.

If there's one plot element that I like less and find to be mishandled more frequently than the 'love conquers all' trope, it's the serial killer. I used to be deeply fascinated by serial killers, but their 'fandom' rouses in me a furious disgust that I can only relate to an incident of my youth, when upon turning over a seemingly quite dry dead bird that I hoped to take home as a specimen I found the underside wriggling with maggots.

So naturally I went ahead and read Dark Places by Jon Evans.*

What I want to make perfectly clear up front is that I thought that this was probably the best handling of a serial killer vs. ordinary guy plot that I have ever read... more½

Entertaining and fast-paced with a good enough story. Full review at http://www.canadianauthors.net/e/evans_jon/invisible_armies.php½