Frieda

Das Buch hat mich gut unterhalten und ich mochte es und fand es gut, wie alle Krimis von Poznanski bisher.

Kurzer Inhaltsüberblick:

In einer psychiatrischen Anstalt wird ein Arzt ermordet aufgefunden, geschmückt mit verschiedenen seltsamen Artikeln (Plastikmesser). Kaspari und ihr Kollege Florin übernehmen den Fall und stoßen schon bald auf mehrere auffällige Patienten, wobei eine besonders hervor sticht. Auch im Privatleben der Ermittler passiert so einiges.

Meine Meinung:

Solide und spannend. Ich fand auch die Auflösung am Ende ziemlich überraschend und wenig vorhersehbar, wobei man zumindest bei dem ein oder anderen schon ein Gefühl hatte. Sind ja letztendlich immer die gleichen Krimiklischees. Über weite Strecken des Buchs kommen die Ermittler nicht voran und alles wird schlimmer und am Ende folgt die Action.

Warum nur drei Sterne?

Den ersten Stern habe ich abgezogen für den plumpen Ausspruch der stationären Psychologin, dass es Personen mit Borderline-Persönlichkeitsstörung Spaß machen würde, andere zu quälen. Das fand ich undifferenziert und hat mich extrem gestört.

Den zweiten Stern habe ich abgezogen wegen des Endes und hier - Vorsicht Spoiler - störte mich dieses allzu typische Krimiklischee, dass die Ermittlerin ganz allein, ohne irgendjemanden zu benachrichtigen (und wenn, dann nur vage) die Verfolgung des Täters aufnimmt und dann natürlich in Schwierigkeiten gerät.

An sich wird der Plot aber größtenteils stimmig und nachvollziehbar aufgelöst, auch wenn er doch eher weit hergeholt ist.

"Das finstere Tal" von Thomas Willmann ist ein Buch, das sehr langsam startet und nach etwa einem Drittel des Buchs gehörig an Fahrt aufnimmt. Auf den ersten 90 Seiten hatte ich den oder anderen Mal den Gedanken, dass ich das Buch am liebsten abbrechen würde: der Schreibstil erfordert volle Konzentration und die Handlung ist schnell umfasst, kriecht aber anfangs nur langsam voran:

Ein fremder Maler taucht im 19. Jhdt. in einem abgeschiedenen Hochtal der Alpen auf - er möchte gegen Bezahlung den Herbst in diesem Tal verbringen und malen. Nur mit genügend Geld gelingt es ihm überhaupt, sich eine Unterkunft im Hochtal zu beschaffen. Dann kommt der Winter und schneidet das Tal vom Rest der Welt ab...

Der Schreibstil von Willmann war anfangs sehr gewöhnungsbedürftig, aber wirklich sehr gut bis außergewöhnlich. Gerade im ersten Drittel waren mir manche Beschreibungen aber zu ausführlich und ich bereitete mich schon auf eine längere Lesedauer vor. Das Durchhalten lohnte sich aber auf jeden Fall!

Dann begannen nämlich die Zeitblenden - und ab da änderte sich alles: für die ersten 90 Seiten haben ich zwei Tage gebraucht, für die restlichen 230 ebenfalls. Da wird einiges Überraschendes offen gelegt und ich konnte das Buch kaum noch zur Seite legen. Und ich finde, dass man an dieses Buch mit so wenig Wissen wie möglich herangehen sollte - da ist meiner Meinung nach eigentlich schon so manche Andeutung in anderen Reviews zu viel.

Von mir gibt's eine Leseempfehlung für alle, die gut durchdachte, gut geschriebene Bücher mögen, die man eigentlich keinem Genre direkt zuordnen kann (dieses vielleicht: Zeitgenössisch und/oder Krimi/Thriller). Sehr gut geschrieben, sehr durchdacht und trickreich.
Mit einem Dank an Cormac McCarthy :-D

I've read 140 pages and couldn't stand it anymore. (Spoilers ahead! But only as far as page 140.)

The main character Tatiana annoyed the hell out of me (I could not stand Tatiana sitting there licking ice cream in her summer dress instead of buying food, because Germany had declared war on Russia the same day and her family had sent her to buy food. I really thought she was utterly stupid.). I also could not stand the overly perfectness of the male hero who's an American (!), but is an officer in the Red Army (!) and walks through Leningrad with Tatiana every evening for three weeks and openly talks about surely forbidden topics, like ... ehm ... the Russian Government wasn't really ... ehm 'fair' (remember, the Germans had declared war on Russia and the Russian leader was Stalin).

I also disliked the "Insta-Love". They see, they fall for each other and behave like idiots instead of just talking (i. e. excessive sitting in busses and staring).

And I surely could not tolerate that this guy was dating her sister at the same time. That he visits the family and sees Tatiana and her sister but plays the role of the sisters lover. WTF? Why does her sister never notice the glances, the tension? Because literally Tatiana and Alexander are eying each other all the time. 

And at last I did not like how Tatiana adored him anyway. Adored everything he did! And sacrificed this supercool love because "she had only one sister" and would never hurt her.

Stop - the last wasn't the last. The last annoyance was the writing style. I thought it was cheesy: too many short sentences, too many sentences with a "She, He, It" at the beginning, too many short paragraphs, too many turns in paragraphs. Too dry.

Maybe I just did not get the point (I am not really the regular romance reader ;-) ), maybe I gave up to early. I don't mind. I just didn't like it enough to read further.

Andy Weir created a powerful and very enjoyable main character. Man, Mark Watney is really fucked up! Because he is alone. On Mars. Without enough food and water. Impossible to survive that!

BUT he's a botanist (!) and a very intelligent engineer (let's just say he's MacGyver reborn on Mars) and he says the words "I'm fucked up" very seldomly. Just fear his botanist powers!
And he ist very cool. His glass of water is always half full. He never gives up. And he can be very funny and has a sense of humor I very much liked.

He and his dealing with the situation made this book very enjoyable. 

So why is that full fifth star missing?

This book is very well researched. Really, while reading this I thought: Man, that sounds like a thing that could really happen! Physics, Maths, Botany - all on board and all of what I expect while reading a great Science-Fiction novel. But the technically descriptions of Watney's 'repairs', 'tweakings' or whatever were sometimes a little bit overdone / extra detailed (sorry for that, I'm no engineer and lost contact sometimes and I admit I overread some of it ^^)

Nevertheless a great read. SCIENCE. And suspenseful. With a great main character. On Mars. :-)

Description by the publisher:

Destined to be a classic, this "powerfully moving" (Chad Harbach, The Art of Fielding), multigenerational debut novel of an Irish-American family is nothing short of a “masterwork” (Joshua Ferris, Then We Came to the End).

Born in 1941, Eileen Tumulty is raised by her Irish immigrant parents in Woodside, Queens, in an apartment where the mood swings between heartbreak and hilarity, depending on whether guests are over and how much alcohol has been consumed.

When Eileen meets Ed Leary, a scientist whose bearing is nothing like those of the men she grew up with, she thinks she’s found the perfect partner to deliver her to the cosmopolitan world she longs to inhabit. They marry, and Eileen quickly discovers Ed doesn’t aspire to the same, ever bigger, stakes in the American Dream.

Eileen encourages her husband to want more: a better job, better friends, a better house, but as years pass it becomes clear that his growing reluctance is part of a deeper psychological shift. An inescapable darkness enters their lives, and Eileen and Ed and their son Connell try desperately to hold together a semblance of the reality they have known, and to preserve, against long odds, an idea they have cherished of the future.

Through the Learys, novelist Matthew Thomas charts the story of the American Century, particularly the promise of domestic bliss and economic prosperity that captured hearts and minds after WWII. The result is a riveting and affecting work of art; one that reminds us that life is more than a tally of victories and defeats, that we live to love and be loved, and that we should tell each other so before the moment slips away. 

Epic in scope, heroic in character, masterful in prose, We Are Not Ourselves heralds the arrival of a major new talent in contemporary fiction.

Pages: 608

Price: 11,34 € Kindle Edition, 19,38 € Hardcover (today prices @ Amazon.de)

Note: Expected publication date is September 2nd 2014 so there might still be changes possible. It is available @ Netgalley.com.

My honest opinion:

This book is a family story with epic dimensions which impressed me very much. I still feel emotionally touched and some scenes come back to my mind hours after putting that book down (and I feel like I'll think about this book tomorrow and next week ...).

This book wasn't perfect though: I had some hard times reading the first half of the book because the author is very detailed sometimes and I never knew whether an event would be important for the further story. In fact I hardly knew where the story would lead, what's the point of it. But after the first half and discovering the 'real issue' of the book I thought it was brilliant to invest that much time into character developement.

And I have to just say that. The characters of this book are very very well described. They came very much to life for me. For instance I talked with my best friend about this book (He will not read this book because he's a pure science-fiction reader.) and every time when I talked with him about the characters it was as if I really knew that people. I said: "Oh man, I hope [The Character]'s going to be alright" or "Do you want to know what's further happened with [the character]?" and then we talked about this people and their problems. Generally it doesn't happen often I talk so intensively about a book but I wanted to talk a lot about this one.

As I said the first half of the book wasn't that good and I think it could have been a little bit shorter. But once I was through I almost couldn't stop reading although I knew what the logical conclusion of that 'inescapable darkness' that enters the life of the family must be. I will not give away what that 'darkness' or 'the real issue' might be because I think it is important the reader does not know beforehand. For instance while reading the book I speculated very often and I also think it would keep some potential readers from reading this touching and somewhat important book.

Most of the story is told by Eileen, starting in 1950 and ending in the 2000s.Later in the book there are some changes in perspective. The first one did disturb me a little bit. The following ones very easier to read as they happened more frequently. I did not always like Eileen but she's still a rather strong character with a well defined will. I liked his husband Ed - a scientist - very much although I rolled my eyes when Eileen met him in the book (he seemed to be the perfect guy: athletic, intelligent, good looking - all the clichés). But he's also modest, likeable and a passionate teacher at the university. I'm also into science so I could identify whith him a little bit. 

Although the book wasn't perfect in every sense I rate it 5 stars. I feel like that book deserves them for touching me so immensely.

Thanks to Simon and Shuster for a digital copy of that book.

Altogether I liked this Young-Adult-Science-Fiction-Dystopian book. The first 100 pages were amazing: the main character Cassie (a 16 year old girl) describes the alien-apocalypse and how it happened she lost her little brother to the aliens. The first three waves to wipe the earth from humanity. It gripped me very much. There were some minor flaws like [SPOILER] the virus being the third wave and not the first and that big thing the aliens 'throw' into the oceans to produce tsunamis ... ok. I could live with that[/SPOILER]

But then Cassie meets a guy.

You know what I am aiming at. A guy. THAT kind of guy (young adult teenage guy). A good/bad guy. Cassie never knows. The bad/good guy helps her in a way. And from there on I was so annoyed by Cassie. She ever whining: 'Can I trust him? Oh no, oh yes, ohhhhhh... and did I ever mention his chocolate colored eyes?'. I wanted to shake her and ... ok.

The second thing that disturbed me was that the story became predictable by scenes from a second storyline in the book. It was written from the sight of a ... ehm ... guy, but not the guy who Cassie meets. But she knows him from before the alien invasion. So I kind of felt where that would lead. And in the end I've been right (oh yeah ... oh no). 

It has been a gripping story nevertheless. I liked that. Although I sensed the outcoming, the invasion and the forthcoming of the story were suspenseful and I want to read the 2nd part sometimes. But please, author: Cassie needs more reasonable thinking.

Note: I don't like YA or love triangles, quadrates or whatever very much. If you like such YA-stories (dystopian, love triangle - quadrats) you might still like the book more than I did.

Ich habe dieses Buch nach dem 5-Sterne-Read von "A Game of Thrones" gelesen. Das hat es dem Buch vielleicht auch schwer gemacht. Aber die beiden Bücher gehören unterschiedlichen Genres an und deshalb behaupte ich von mir, dass mich das geniale Buch vorher nicht allzu sehr beeinflusst hat.

Der Mordfall in diesem Kriminalroman war weder sehr speziell noch besonders aufregend. Über weite Strecken hat mich das Buch gelangweilt, weil es gefüllt war von persönlichen Bedindlichkeiten. Auch der ein oder andere Tatverdächtige entpuppte sich als durchschaubare Fehlleitung des Autors. Störend fand ich auch plötzliche Perspektivenwechsel mitten im Kapitel, für einen Absatz oder zwei. Man liest ein Kapitel aus der Sicht einer Person und plötzlich liest man "als geheimer" Insider die Gedanken der befragten (anderen) Person.

Das Buch hat mich insbesondere am Anfang immer dann genervt, wenn über den Hauptcharakter Sebastian Bergman berichtet wurde bzw. über dessen Erleben und Erfahrungen. Es wird ja schnell deutlich, dass er ein ziemlich unsympathischer Geselle ist und das weiß man auch, wenn man das Buch beginnt (steht im Klappentext). Eigentlich habe ich ein Faible dafür. Aber Bergman war für mich zu überspitzt dargestellt - er nervte mich nur noch. Der Versuch, ihm einen tiefgründigen Touch zu geben, aufgrund von Verlusten in der Vergangenheit, ist zweifellos vorhanden, scheiterte aber bei mir.

Auch von den übrigen Protagonisten fand ich keinen einzigen irgendwie sympathisch oder irgendwie hervorhebenswert. Keinen einziger aus einem 5-köpfigen Ermittlerteam.

Woher der Ruf nach einem 2. Stieg Larsson kommt, ist mir auch ein Rätsel? Weil es eine ziemlich unverbindliche Affäre gibt? Die ich aber zu gewollt und unglaubwürdig fand und mich nicht überzeugt hat, zumal gerade der Hauptermittler Torkel total farblos blieb. Als würde eine Affäre unter Kollegen nicht die Teamarbeit beeinflussen ... neeeein.

Ich muss zugeben, dass ich das Buch nicht zu Ende gelesen habe. Nachdem ich bereits ziemlich früh ein Gefühl hatte, wer der Mörder sein könnte und sich dieses Gefühl dann 50 Seiten vor Schluss bestätigt hatte, habe ich beschlossen, mir die letzten Seiten nicht mehr anzutun. Kann sein, dass mir etwas entgangen ist, ich habe aber kein schlechtes Gefühl dabei.

Als Fazit bleibt für mich nur:

Der Ermittler, von dem ich nie wieder lese. Oder: Schwedenkrimis sind und bleiben nicht meins.

Please read book 1 (Ashfall) and book 2 (Ashen Winter) before reading that review. Even the naming of characters could basically spoil one of the prior books. If you want my opionion without the naming of characters, here's my short opinion:

The whole series does not really feel like Young Adult (which I don't particularly love). The author did a great job at researching the possible effects of the eruption of the Yellowstone-Vulcano and the obstacles survivers in an postapocalyptic winter would have to face. In Sunrise the pace is not that quick but it's still suspenseful and had some very surprising (and shocking and also beautiful) moments. Surviving begins to contain more and more politics and a lot of building. The characters are lovely and I liked the most of some (there's also an evil villain). I always hoped so much for some of the characters. The ending was not perfect, but I liked it. All loose filaments joined together.

Here is my long opinion:

So it is over. The Ashfall-Series ended with Sunrise and I feel a little bit sad about the fact, that I have to leave the characters (okay, I don't have to, I could read the series again which I do sometime). But the series ended in a great way.

I will not say much about the plot because I don't want to spoil anything. As I said in my short review surviving, action, politics, building and relationships are the main topics. The story was gripping and had some very surprising elements: I never knew what would come next. I also had a feeling of menace while reading the book. The time span is larger than in the previous books (years).

The main character Alex is even more mature than in the previous book Ashen Winter. He and Darla are so rational and grounded. I loved that. I liked that in their relationship do not occur implausible dramatic fightings like girl finds boyfriend hugging another girl and then there's fighting blabla. No, Alex and Darla just talk with each other. The drama does not arise from the relationship but rather from the hard environment and the difficulties it creates.

Alex is also a very noble hero and I loved that. Sometimes really too good to be true. But it's just a book. I found him believable though because he always remained true to his principles. Besides that I really can not imagine someone who's that kindheartet after a 'real apocalype'. But, well, it's Young Adult after all. 

Although the book is well researched there were some minor details that did not fit perfectly. But they did not annoy me because overall it felt like a complete packet.

I received a digital copy via Netgalley. Thanks to Tanglewood Press.

I really liked that book.

I loved both of the main characters: Darla and Alex. They are quite unique and adoreable heros. Alex has a very soft heart and is loyal to his friends. Sometimes his heart seems to be even too soft for this post-apocalyptic world. Darla is very strong and has great technical understanding. I liked that inversion of 'typical roles'. Both seem to be very mature but that's believeable in the cold vulcanic winter.

In Ashen Winter we meet some new characters who add up very well to the story. I liked most of the new characters and Ben was just wonderful.

The story is told in a very fast manner and actionloaded. Mike Mullin seems to feel obliged to describe especially technical things very detailed. It becomes clear that he wants everything to be consistent and at the end he thanks all those people who advised him about autism, radios/antennas, propane, military trucks, guns. I did not find any objectionable flaws to be exactly. But I think that part was sometimes a bit too overdone. It sometimes felt like a click-and-point action adventure where the characters have to find the nessecary tools and build something they need.

Besides that it was a good young adult story set up in a cold world full of snow and ash. I look forward to read book 3 (Sunrise) in the next days. Fortunately I received a copy of Sunrise from Netgalley.