Meg

Rating:
Summary: Exploitive rip-off of Benchley's jaws; Micky Mouse writing
Review: This "book," is a cheap, hideously written thing designed to cash-in on Jaws and Jurassic park. A lack of originality and integrity does not neccesarily make something a bad read. But in the case of "MEG" it is so incredibly awful and weakly done that it's intolerable; you'll want to take a long hot shower and get a refund on your money if you buy it. Steve Alten's agent, if he were truly looking out for him, would have directed him to a writers workshop instead of rushing to market. The manuscript wasn't ready and neither was Alten. The worst thing about it is the publishers did a pretty good job packaging it and have pushed it on an unsuspecting public, hoping to take advantage. But that's all that it is: an empty package. If you want good contemporary sea stories read Peter Benchley, or go back to the all time classics of Joseph Conrad or Herman Melville

Rating:
Summary: Not bad but the writing needs to be improved
Review: Very creative but the writer could be more careful not to repeat the same or similar information again and again in dialogues or most paragraphs. Readers who liked this book, for advanced and more mature readings, please check out No.205 of Amazon.com 500, THE UNIVERSE BELOW-Discovering The Secrets of The Deep Sea, and most of Clive Cussler's deep sea adventures, such as NIGHT PROBE! and others

Rating:
Summary: The writing is very raw;Disney might transform it better?
Review: If you could read it not so blindly with just a little bit consciousness, you might find this book's plots and scenarios leaked like a sift! This is a very green writer not only short of consistancy and talent but always struggling even in dialogue writing. But this book's editing and printing were pretty smart: Dividing a not-so-long story with many chapters and balooned it up to 277 pages for a higher sale price! Such editing also made it very easy to read. Very very Smart editing! If the publisher could do so, no wonder the writer could make a 20 tons Megalodon sink a 8,000(+-) tons sub, and shot all the print-outs around him by a Megaprinter

Rating:
Summary: The writing is very raw;Disney might transform it better?
Review: 1)If I were one of the audience of Professor Tylor's lecture, I might need a refund, since I didn't hear lot of information but a poorly prepared subject repeated again and again.2)P.14 line 6: She's grown to his money, "his" was an obscured word--whose money?3)P.10, The crowd erupted. Why? There was nothing might cause such eruption!4)P.23, last line:"What the hell did this?" What the hell it meant?5)P.33,lower para...a realm of computer printout scattered all around him. What kind of printer is this? I've never seen a printer can shoot out printed paper(s) like this. Old models could only print out linked sheets, while laser printer's print-outs always stacked up neatly. 6)P.35,3rd line: "How's your head?" Terry should ask Jonas' hand which hit Bud last night.7)P.29three-inch-thick, but on P.42, it became "over four -inch" 8)P.45,last sentence, "she" should be "it" for a lagoon. Very green writer short of consistancy. This book's editing and printing were very smart: dividing a sh

Rating:
Summary: Great plot, but the writing is very poor
Review: After reading the Kirkus review of this book, and seeing an endorsemnet of it by another critic on CBS This Morning, I thought this was going to be a great, light read. It was not. I usually love books about prehistoric monsters terrorizing modern humans. At first, the premise of the book seemed promising enough. The first sixty-pages or so were interesting and fact-filled. However, once the title creature makes its appearence, the novel loses its only footing. The book becomes a series of shark attacks with little, if any, human interaction between the events. This may have been tolerable if the author had at least some sense of suspence: the "scary" parts of the novel are so poorly and hastily written that I actually became bored when the shark attacked! Another problem of the book is that the author seems to be trying to out-do every other writer of the genre. The opening chapter begins with a Meg attacking and killing a Tyrannosaurus Rex. The author seems to be saying "Look how much scarier my creature is than Crichton's." Once the creature is loose in the modern world, it goes on a rampage Godzilla would envy. It destroys a nuclear submarine, sinks several boats, wrecks several flying helicopters(!), and must eat dozens of people. The author is trying to defeat Jaws, and fails miserably. He needs to learn subtly. Killing 30 "faceless" people is not scary, killing three with fully developed personalities is. All I can say is that the critics who gave this novel good reviews must have been high when they read it

Rating:
Summary: Just another turn-bad movie screenplay!
Review: What happen here is a book that the author claimed to have at least 10 years research but definitely fell short since he could only get all the information from two books, not even could have the opportunity to copy some information from the out of print MEGALODON in 1983 and QUEST FOR MEGALODON published in 199? What kind of research is this? I totally agree to the comments from a great reader of [e-mail] and only wish I could say better. I also have to say that the KIRKUS REVIEW OF 4/15/97 shown above, is a very stupid review. Because the reviewer has almost told the whole detailed story for this try-to-be-in-depth, single-minded book! We don't need a reviewer to dump us any book with the whole 9 yards. This kind of review could only make a simple story look even simpler and worse

Rating:
Summary: Great story idea, poorly written, gets silly at the end
Review: The general outline of this story is a lot of fun - a giant prehistoric shark, whose species has been trapped at the bottom of the ocean by a thermocline, is suddenly released to roam the ocean due to an acident caused by man's witless tinkering. This is the sort of story that is routinely conjured up by a group of friends sitting around on a patio in the summer watching both the sun and the quantity of gin left in their party-sized jug sink slowly out of sight. Steve Alten should have savored the story, the gin, and the sunny afternoon as a pleasant memory; instead, he chose to to preserve the story in writing. With the help of two to five page chapters, Mr. Alten has failed to develop a single character, even the protagonist, in sufficient depth to make the reader care what happens. Thus, the "novel of deep terror" is a poorly written story of deep ennui. Such obvious gaffs as referring to an airplane's instrument panel as a "dashboard," and a helicopter's canopy as a "windshield," are minor distractions. The real silliness begins when Jonas zooms into the belly of the megalodon in his one-man submarine, exits the sub at the esophagus station, and performs heart surgery from the inside out - all at a nifty 1500 foot depth. The comparison of Jonas in the meg to Jonah in the whale is not "deep terror." In truth, it is not even deep. The final insult occurs in the Author's Note, wherein we are informed that the author has done a "tremendous amount of research" to "maintain a high degree of realism," then we are favored with a single source on the great white shark. I learned more about the meg from the one-paragraph discription that was included with the meg tooth I purchased years ago in North Carolina

Rating:
Summary: I liked it for what it was.
Review: This is a great beach book or an awful beach book depending on whether you're sitting on the beach reading it or treading water, looking back at the beach and thinking about it. The writing is not all that great. The story's been done before (Jaws, in case you're from another planet), but with a guppy compared to Meg! I've recommended it to several people in the bookstore for which I work, and I've had no complaints. It's fun, it's fluff and I wager it's gonna be a good movie

Rating:
Summary: reads faster than a charging white shark
Review: This book reads amazingly fast, of course, it isn't all that big. But it is a fun summer read that will keep your attention. Alten researched both sharks and whales extensively, and it shows.
His main character, Jonas Taylor, is well written, as are a few other characters, but some of the human interaction is slow and forced, such as the romantic development between Taylor and Terry Tanaka. The complete carnage toward the end of the book is a bit much, and while I don't want to ruin the ending, Taylor's final confrontation with Meg does stretch believability.
However, the action moves very quickly and hardly ever misses a beat, and you will want to get to the end to see how it all turns out. Alten mixes known science with great imagination to provide a great story which reminds us that what we don't know far exceeds what we do. And what we dont' know can hurt us.

Rating:
Summary: Same Story, Different Shark
Review: What's bigger than a Great White Shark? A Megalodon. What's a faster read than a Benchley novel? Meg. What will make you think you've read this before? Meg. Althought the story is very similiar to JAWS, the book is enjoyable and fast-reading. For the newer generation of readers who have not read JAWS, this novel will make you look forward to the author's next book. On the whole, the book was okay