The Devil You Know : A Novel

Rating:
Summary: Would have made a good short story
Review: I had high hopes that this would be an exciting read because of the basic premise of a family being chased by bad guys in the wilderness. There were some suspenseful sections, but they were hardly worth reading all the extraneous parts to get to. I think the author tried too hard at creating literature than in writing a good story. Characters could see in the dark because of the "gloaming" several times. At least I was forced to use the dictionary and find that gloaming means twilight. The children here were constantly getting their hair "tousled". Best (or worst) of all, "the leaves clattered like a million green voices". Yuch! Maybe my tastes are too simple, but give me a good Stephen King or Dean Koontz book and I think I'll pass on the "literary" novels in the future.

Rating:
Summary: Would have made a good short story
Review: I had high hopes that this would be an exciting read because of the basic premise of a family being chased by bad guys in the wilderness. There were some suspenseful sections, but they were hardly worth reading all the extraneous parts to get to. I think the author tried too hard at creating literature than in writing a good story. Characters could see in the dark because of the "gloaming" several times. At least I was forced to use the dictionary and find that gloaming means twilight. The children here were constantly getting their hair "tousled". Best (or worst) of all, "the leaves clattered like a million green voices". Yuch! Maybe my tastes are too simple, but give me a good Stephen King or Dean Koontz book and I think I'll pass on the "literary" novels in the future.

Rating:
Summary: Interesting
Review: I normally do not read best-sellers or "page-turners," but when I saw that the author was a teacher at the Iowa Workshop and that it was set in the Boundary Waters wilderness in the seventies (I went on two life changing trips in this area as a teen from Chicago in the seventies) I was excited about reading this book. I enjoyed the book a great deal and stayed up later than normal each night reading it.

I thought it was curious that the author is a writing teacher yet a lot of the story telling was, well, less succinct than a writing teacher would let a writing student get away with. Also, the writer, when he really gets in his element, has a peculiar way of using a lot of commas, which for me is distracting and decelerating - but I think this is his personal style and ultimately it works.

Whenever I read a book like this my impression is that the writer isn't writing a book but is writing something they hope will be made into a movie. I don't know if this one will be filmed - I hope it will.