Waxwings: A Novel

by Jonathan Raban

From the bestselling, award-winning author of Bad Land comes a powerful novel set in Seattle in 1999, a city troubled by rioting anarchists, vanishing children, and the discovery of an al-Qaeda operative. 

“A tour de force.” — The Washington Post Book World

Jonathan Raban’s powerful novel is set in Seattle at the height of its infatuation with the virtual. It’s a place that attracts immigrants. One of these is Tom Janeway, a bookish Hungarian-born Englishman who makes his living commenting on American mores on NPR. Another, who calls himself Chick, is a frenetically industrious illegal alien from China who makes his living any way he can.

Through a series of extraordinary but chillingly plausible events, the paths of these newcomers converge. Tom is uprooted from his marriage and must learn to father his endearing eight-year old son part-time. Chick claws his way up from exploited to exploiter. Meanwhile Seattle is a city on the brink. Savage and tender, visionary and addictively entertaining, Waxwings is a major achievement.

Genres: Fiction, Book Club, Contemporary, Novels, American

288 pages, Paperback

First published September 30, 2003

About the author

British travel writer, critic and novelist

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonathan...

Reviews

[Mind the Book · Rating 4 out of 5]

EHVJR (äntli-fucki-ligen!!) som a n d a s Pacific Northwest. Karaktärerna läser The Stranger och Seattle Times, handlar böcker på Elliott Bay och lyssnar på Eddie Vedder. Tyckte mig lära känna Seattle sotto la pelle genom att läsa den här romanen, samtidigt som jag gick omkring i stan och gjorde likadant. På sidan 21 finns formuleringen som får mig att rysa, att PNW är "gratifyingly remote - [...] something like America's own Outer Hebrides".

Boken är dessutom bookish per se och därtill ganska British, vilket gör att prosan påminner om Sebastian Faulks, tänkte jag många gånger, särskilt A Week in December. Intrigen intresserar mig inte nämnvärt; slutet på dotcom-eran - närmast Klondikestämning - men språket är glimrande.

[Len · Rating 3 out of 5]

The first two chapters were really well written. The captain, first officer and pilot bringing a huge container ship into Puget Sound and successfully tying up at the Seattle quayside and then the discovery of the Chinese stowaways and the escape of Jin Peng off the ship and out of the container port. It was a very promising start to what turned out to be a disappointing novel.

The author gets carried off into a diatribe against modern times, especially the huge sums of money to be made in computer technology, with what is suggested as the opposite to the true American way of pulling yourself up by your bootstraps, achieving success through hard work and enterprise, and prizing honesty, calloused hands and the sweat on your brow above simple acquisition. In fact it is Jin Peng, the illegal immigrant, who is allowed to show how it should be done, progressing from dishwasher in a Chinese backstreet restaurant to business owner in a remarkably short space of time.

The main character, Tom, who is a British university lecturer working in Seattle, sits in the middle preferring his books and literature to what is happening around him. His wife works for a new computer startup company selling property online and making enormous profits for her boss. She is becoming increasingly frustrated at her husband's apparent belief that his sedentary way of life is all right and is the way life should be. A separation and divorce is imminent. Then the other side of the real world imposes itself on Tom when Jin Peng turns up on his doorstep operating a home renovation business. Tom gets sucked into dealing with Jin's working class energy against his wishes.

And then disaster happens. Tom takes a walk in the open air and ends up accused of abducting and possibly assaulting or murdering a young girl. As a scenario it should have ramped up the story several notches in tension, but it doesn't. Everything seems to deflate instead. Tom still drifts through life even though he is interviewed by the police, his wife finally leaves him, he is suspended from his job, and dragged through the gutter by the local press. You want to shout at him: "WAKE YOURSELF UP! You idiot," while knowing it would make no difference. The plot becomes slower and slower and no one cares too much. Even when the scene shift's to Jin's venture into maritime capitalism and he is on the verge of being stung by a corrupt entrepreneur, there is a feeling of everyone shrugging their shoulders. "Oh well, never mind."

And that is how I ended up feeling. Is Tom innocent? The book will tell you but does it matter? Will Jin be arrested and deported? Whatever. He'll probably get over it. Will Tom and Beth be reunited and will their little boy Finn have both a mummy and a daddy again? I think cutting my toenails would be more interesting. Sadly the story disintegrates as Tom's apathy spreads and everything fades away.

[Marian Deegan · Rating 4 out of 5]

I ran into Waxwings by pure blazing chance while wandering through the library. Raban is a lovely writer, and Waxwings is an empathetically keen commentary on the teetering height of the dot-com era and on the stumbling longings of the human heart.

Waxwings takes place in Seattle, where the high-tech population pushes hard against the boundaries of the Northwest wilderness, oblivious to the feral forces displaced. (My sister in nearby Spokane tells of a suburban neighbor who strolled out to fetch the mail, only to discover a hungry-eyed cougar crouched on her front porch, patiently looking out for the next chubby toddler on a slow-movin’ trike to wobble down the sidewalk. This is exactly the frisson Raban catches.) Through stories of a perilously self-absorbed NPR commentator and a desperately resourceful illegal Chinese immigrant, Raban paints a moment in Seattle's history that is compelling from both a cultural and personal perspective. One of Raban's gifts is his ability to walk us along with his characters through understandably chance circumstances. When unforeseen consequences avalanche into the narrative trail, we are as startlingly appalled as his characters. Raban writes with humor, moments of ravishing insight, and a gentleness that holds me as much as his unexpected twists of plot and sympathetically drawn characters. I was sorry I had not found this book when it was written, while I was still coming to terms with the post 9-11 sea change. In the back of my mind, I kept waiting for the raison d’être for the "Waxwings" title to appear. When it did, the revelation left me stunned with admiration for this writer's talents.

I'll be reading more of Raban.

[cindy · Rating 2 out of 5]

being from seattle, the fact this book is set here doesnt save it. in fact, it only served to make it worse.

[Andrew]

I wasn't sure whether to class it as American or British fiction, but settled on American. While Raban writes within the British tradition, this was written in American, and is very much a novel of America... more specifically, my lovely adopted city of Seattle. I'd never read a novel set predominantly in Seattle before, and Raban writes about it almost rhapsodically, treating it with a reverence and sweetheartedness, even when he's describing the vacuous, emotionally hollow lives of its techies. Hey, I'm a vacuous, emotionally hollow wage slave at a start-up in Seattle! Woooo!!!!

While his characters are wonderfully sketched, I can't say I'm terribly enamored of his writing by and large. He's a fantastic travel writer, but his witty, journalistic, descriptive tone doesn't translate all that well to the novel form. His exposition was chunky, almost stagey. The dust jacket compared him to Tom Wolfe, and in this sense, they're right, and that's not a compliment. However, I'm much more OK with Raban salivating over his own words than Tom Wolfe. When all is said and done, I enjoyed reading it, but I'm afraid that's largely because it's set in my world. Even so, it's a fun read. I can safely call it a great accompaniment to the beach... especially if that beach happens to be Golden Gardens, Mathews, Madison, or Alki.

[John Hieb · Rating 1 out of 5]

This is the most random book I have ever finished. It's like someone took a bunch of puzzle pieces from different puzzles and tried to fit them together.

[Chris Berry · Rating 2 out of 5]

Interesting characters and lots of potential early in the novel but it just meanders , goes off down dead ends and ends in a whimper . I wish I’d given up earlier. Only gave it 2 stars because I finished it

[Amy · Rating 2 out of 5]

This follows the lives of several Seattlites in the 1990s, so it's pretty cool if you're from Seattle, but overall it was kind of boring and anti-climatic.

[Rock Duckard · Rating 2 out of 5]

Bonfire of the Vanities on the cheap. Raban is writing an essay he believes is a novel, I think, full of surface-level observations about PNW culture at the turn of the century. But you have to have characters that are believable, or more fully realized than crayon drawings, to make a reader care about them.

Every character in this story is unpleasant. The story wants to tell us about failed human connections in a time of great change, but Raban can only offer contrived, undeveloped incidents to put his characters in various mild jeopardies.

Our main character Tom is, bluntly, an oblivious idiot whose must be naïve to the point of brain damage for his life to collapse as abruptly as it does. Raban tries to stir up drama by creating a scenario in which Tom would be the murder suspect of a young girl based on… absolutely no evidence at all. Tom is then scarlet-lettered into hermitage by the entire city, aided by a ludicrous piece in The Stranger (Really?!!) all but putting a bloody knife in his hand like a British tabloid. This plot development springs up out of absolutely nowhere in the middle of the book. Nevertheless, Raban happily springs our hero free of all charges by revealing that the missing girl was… murdered by someone else. Great. The casual exploitation of child murder to facilitate Tom’s new lease on life is weird and kind of disgusting.

Every other character is venal, greedy, hateful, dumb and/or one-dimensional. I don’t know even know what the themes are. The potential of the WTO riots to center the clash of the working class versus the rich is reduced to: will my wife’s new Audi escape in one piece? (Spoiler: it does!) “Waxwings” is a shambles.

Tom is a self-absorbed British writer whose ill-formed observations about culture are less important than his endless musings on English literature that fly over the head of anyone without a Master’s in same. He sounds a lot like Jonathan Raban!

[Robert Walkley · Rating 3 out of 5]

Before I found this book, I did not know Jonathan Raban wrote fiction. I’ve always thought of him as a literary critic and a writer of non-fiction.This story takes place in Seattle, a town Raban knows well. Ships play a central part in the story. Mr. Raban knows a lot about ships. And one of the main characters is a teacher and a novelist. Two more things Raban knows a lot about. And I think Mr. Raban is a birder. His knowledge of birds plays into the book’s title. My favorite character is Chick. He is a Chinese illegal who stows away in a boat from China and lands in Seattle. His story quickly intermixes with that of the main characters, a family of three undergoing there own rough seas. Raban gives us a good sense of what it like to survive as an illegal on the street. Chick arrives here sick and hungry, with no money, almost no clothes, no food, no place to sleep, and knowing only a few words of English. Somehow he manages to survive and even prosper by using his wits and by working hard. His story is compelling. I did not enjoy the other characters nearly as much. Maybe they seemed too familiar, even boring. If you are a fan of Raban’s non-fiction, this book is a worthwhile read. I may try one of his more recent novels.

[Nikki · Rating 3 out of 5]

I chose this book because it was set in Seattle, and I'm not sure I would have enjoyed it as much if it hadn't been. Reading a book set here just after we arrived led to pleasurable moments such as a flash of recognition at the mention of a Chihuly glass sculpture at a fancy dinner party, or the ability to clearly imagine the locations of some of the book's key incidents. I also enjoyed the description of the anxiety-tinged frenzy of working towards a product launch in a dotcom office. I found some of the plotting a little contrived, although I'm not sure why - given my own tendency to get lost in reverie and miss the practical details of the world around me, it seems odd that I was unwilling to believe that the same behaviour would have such extreme consequences here. I did appreciate the moral ambiguity of the characters, particularly the illegal immigrant who is initially very easy to relate to and sympathise with (and be amused by at times as he grapples with the basics of American culture), meaning that we understand his desperation and admire his talent for survival before being shown how his determination to succeed at any cost can affect others.

[Kyra · Rating 4 out of 5]

Okay, I loved this book. BUT - and it is a capitalized but - I have some questions/puzzlers/caveats. Since I do not belong to a book club or reading group, I will put them out here. Why the waxwings ? Are they symbolic or just something that happened to the author and he decided to stick them in as a form of icing on the cake ? Secondly, I cannot believe in the wife. She is just about the most unrealistic implausible woman I have met in literature. My male partner, who did read this book also and loved it ditto, said she seems realistic to HIM. But not to me. Since Jonathan Raban's works are largely autobiographical (as per the Guardian review I found online), is she a reflection of one of his previous wives ? I see no rationale for the protagonist to have actually married this self-centred obtuse woman. None. Nor any solid reason for them breaking up. You have to have something first in order to break it. Yes? No ? Or am I just way out of sync with the rest of North America?
Caveats and puzzlers aside, this is a terrific book. Funny, suspenseful and nary a dull moment. Trollopian Seattle displayed on a delicious dish. Not sure about those birds though.

[Virginia · Rating 2 out of 5]

I have no idea what to think of this book so I read what other people said about it. Someone said they gave it two stars because he finished it. Works for me.
Tom is a writer working at a Seattle university. After reading an email he had written but not sent, he thought "there were rather too many grandiloquent flourishes." That is how I felt about the whole book.
This book tries to compare two immigrant stories in dot com Seattle, but it doesn't work. The Chinaman goes from not knowing much English to supervising his own Mexican crew way too fast.
Also too fast was how the Englishman's wife wants a divorce. They seems like a happy couple and then she moves out. A lot of her story line seems unnecessary used only to keep it in the tech world.
Also unnecessary is the story line about a fraudulent grant to the university.
I almost stopped reading when their son was taken to a psychologist. Luckily it didn't go in the direction I was thinking it would. That was refreshing, but not enough for me to recommend the book. I would have liked it better if it stuck to the missing child story line.

[David Grosskopf · Rating 3 out of 5]

Jonathan Raban sets Waxwings so intimately and minutely into the city of Seattle at the turn of the millennium that I could identify different houses, street corners, buildings; and what a strange, explosive time in Seattle's history, with its bizarre playground tech startups and the WTO Battle of Seattle.

This book features several narrative consciences but maybe only one inviting empathic connection--the self-absorbed, Victorian scholar at UW and NPR commentator, Hungarian descended Tom Janeway.

We also sometimes get his wife Beth's perspective, harried in her own work at the ridiculous, successful startup GetaShack, but contemptuous of Tom's quirks, curiosities, and decencies in ways that only seem bitter.

And then there is Chick, shortened from the slur, a Chinese immigrant who'd stowed away in horrific conditions in a container and is able, through competence and smarts, to hustle his way forward.

I like the kid in the book, Finn; I liked his Squashy Bear. I liked so many of the intimate details of the book. And though Waxwings nails so much of Seattle's streets, none of the characters felt particularly familiar to me.

[John Cooper · Rating 4 out of 5]

Is this the definitive book on pre-9/11 Seattle? Of that time just before the 2000 dot.com crash, the years of the first startups and the WTO riots? To one who was there, it sure seems that way. I've never read a book with so many spot-on topical references, all perfectly chosen to act either as background color or foreground illustration, whichever is needed; and I've rarely read one whose characters and situations serve so well to make vivid a particular cultural moment. And I should say right away that it's also an easy reading, fun novel, frequently funny in a dry yet somehow warm way, convincing in its plot and fair to its characters. Maybe the fact that it was published in 2003, just a few short years from the time in which it's set, accounts for the vividness and lack of falsifying nostalgia, but it's a rare feat to be so clear-eyed about one's own time, to see accurately without the perspective of distance. Read it if you were there, or if you weren't.

[Siobhan Markwell · Rating 3 out of 5]

At the beginning of the novel, I thought I was in for an intellectual, literary novel of sorts but, although Raban writes sharp and entertaining prose, I ended up slightly disappointed that it became a comedic tale of one separated man's trials in co-parenting and navigating the pitfalls of groupthink. I felt a bit sad that the Chinese immigrant figure was rather made a trope to be giggled at, especially after a really promising immigration raid scene. Still, this is a wryly funny, pacy and entertaining read that a lot of people might enjoy.

[Woody · Rating 4 out of 5]

A thoroughly engaging, multi-faceted story set in the dot com boom era of Seattle in the late 1990s. The character development is fantastic, ranging from an academic to a Chinese immigrant to a ruthless ship salesman and dock operator to a young boy. Raban makes these characters believable and authentic. The entire story would make a fine movie.

[Jacques Richer · Rating 2 out of 5]

Jonathan Raban is a travel writer, but this is a novel. He should stick to travel.

[Jordan St. Stier · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book was fabulous!

[Ron Charles · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's easy to be smug in hindsight. The dot.com bubble already seems as silly as tulip mania 400 years ago. Who were those foolish Amsterdamers trading entire estates for a single bulb? Imagine investing millions to sell groceries over the Web and send them through the mail! Does anyone know how much a 10-pound bag of potatoes weighs?

As Yale University economist Robert Shiller writes, in Irrational Exuberance, "Human nature continues to be the way it has always been and probably always will be: People always feel that innovation has somehow changed the equation."

A new novel by Jonathan Raban calculates the radius of the Internet bubble with the cool eye of an investor who can spot real value. Raban wrote a perceptive travel book in 1999 called Passage to Juneau, and he demonstrates that same sharp eye for the spirit of place again in this novel, his first in 18 years.

Waxwings, the first of three novels to be set in the Pacific Northwest, opens as the millennium closes. Wall Street is throwing ticker tape, but the real pixie dust is coming from the other coast. In cloudy Seattle, under the glorious sunlight of Microsoft, a thousand e-tulips bloom. Internet millionaires bid the city's real estate into the stratosphere. Mercedes crowd parking lots. Bathrooms are tiled with stone cut in Zambia.

Seattle in 1999 is a presatirized, virtual setting, and it's a testament to Raban's control that he can integrate personal and public catastrophes so deftly in this witty novel.

Tom Janeway is a creative-writing professor living in the fog of his own self-absorbed domestic bliss. He spends his days reading novels and thinking up clever things to say in a weekly column. He adores his 5-year-old son and his wife, Beth, who works at a barely plausible Internet start-up called GetaShack.com. A Hungarian-born Englishman, Tom can hardly fathom his good fortune in this lush land of opportunity.

He's living the ideal that draws a desperate man named Chick all the way from China hidden in a container ship, a voyage described in all its horror. While Tom sails along lost in reverie, spinning phrases into money, Chick arrives near death, without a word of English, but with a keen eye for observation.

Over the course of the novel, these two immigrants ride the waves of a city in flux. Riots break out at the World Trade Organization meeting, children disappear, airplanes fall from the sky, terrorists sneak into the port, and Y2K is about to destroy every electronic device in the world.

Boring his students with passages from Victorian novels or jotting droll commentaries for All Things Considered, Tom fails to notice that his son is spinning out of control or that his wife is drifting out of love. "He was incorrigibly innocent," Beth thinks, "utterly thoughtless in his bookish self-absorption, believing himself observant because he could observe things in novels." Even though she's busy accumulating stock options and losing herself on a scheme to design virtual neighborhoods, she finds Tom's abstraction from the world unbearable. What's worse, he only comes out of the clouds to make ironic quips about her work and colleagues.

Obviously Raban identifies with this fellow Englishman, but when Beth announces that she can't endure their marriage any longer, Raban has Tom on the end of a pin. Exhibit A: The pompous nice guy caught completely unawares by his wife's smoldering dissatisfaction. During Tom's dissection, you can hear divorced women everywhere muttering and newly single men whimpering.

Once Tom's life starts downhill, it picks up speed along a path of disastrous coincidences, wheels greased by Tom's obliviousness. Chick, meanwhile, keeps crawling up the labor ladder, scurrying away from the INS and the extortionists who provided him with illegal transportation. Soon, he moves from toiling alongside Mexican workers to managing them.

These two very different stories finally intersect when Chick offers to fix Tom's roof. For a moment, the two immigrants — one concocting a useable identify, the other losing his — are weirdly equalized, huddling over TV dinners for a bleak Christmas meal. There's an unnerving symmetry here in the way Chick awakens to the American dream, while Tom descends into a nightmare of domestic and legal terrors.

If tackling the giant social novels of Jonathan Franzen or Tom Wolfe makes you wish for a book that isn't quite so full, Waxwings may be just the corrective you're after. Raban captures this exuberant era with striking efficiency. He prods us to consider that we're living in a period that makes us all somehow foreigners, desperate for residency.

Originally published in The Christian Science Monitor.

[Kay · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was the first time I've read anything by Raban and on the basis of this book I will be going back for more - and better prepared this time!

There are no spoilers here, don't worry, but the book - especially its blurb - wrongfooted me. By a third of the way through I was sure I was heading for the dark heart of Seattle so when it ends on a relatively upbeat note (all the major characters get something of what they want, if not all of it) I was really rather surprised.

Raban writes with verve and a love of words that gives a lot of his work a manic energy reminiscent of Michael Moorcock's Mother London, he likes to play with words and that is sometimes a little intrusive, but his love for his characters and his ability to fillet a city in the boom years and lay out the hidden mechanisms stops it being a pain.

His Chinese character resonated with entrepreneurs I met in Beijing a few years ago and the dissolution of the marriage between his protagonist Tom and wife Beth is neatly delineated. Their son, Finn, is an interesting character who seems to be heading for darkness too but is redeemed by that most venerable of discoveries, the love of a good (or at least sometimes good) puppy!

I did enjoy this novel, would have enjoyed it more if I hadn't been misled by the jacket notes, and I really liked the energy and enthusiasm of the material which is a fantastic contrast to the morose cynicism of many contemporary writers. I think it's given me a yen to visit Seattle, so definitely Raban has worked some magic on me.

[Adrienne · Rating 3 out of 5]

Chick a survivor from a metal container of Chinese immigrants. Some of his experiences are horrendous but his tale is told with humour. Chick has formed his idea of America from the videos he has seen and his survival is due to copying these and the behaviour of the people he meets. Tom (a Hungarian refugee) is the other main character and he has learned about life in the West from traditional American and English novels. Tom and Chick both employ the American tradition of re-inventing themselves making up their lives as they go along.
The action takes place in Seattle where they have both ended up.
Tom is a professor of creative writing and a father whose marriage has dissolved. Chick has risen to run a construction business. When Tom’s house needs repairing Their lives collide resulting in a bizarre but satisfactory domestic arrangement.
It was challenging to get a grip on the plot but this kept me engaged as I tried to make sense of it. The frequent cultural references pinpoint it as a post-modern story set clearly in the 1990’s and the characterisations endeared the people to me.

[David Watson · Rating 4 out of 5]

After finishing Raban's magnificent Passage to Juneau, I had to see if his fiction was as good as his travel writing. After finishing Waxwings, the verdict is: almost. Raban skilfully brings Seattle on the cusp of the millennium to life in this tale of dot.coms, divorce, illegal immigration, university English Department wranglings and mistaken indentity. The main character, English professor Tom Janeway, is like Raban in many ways; an Englishman who has moved to Seattle and observes what he calls "America's Outer Hebrides" astutely. Like Raban, he goes through a divorce while parenting a young child. So, many of Tom's musings are from Raban's heart. But Waxwings isn't overly sentimental; it's sharp and funny, and the drizzly gloom of Seattle in winter lingered in my mind after I finished the book. By the time you finish, so much has happened that it's easy to forget the brilliant, harrowing beginning, involving illegal immigrants. But the ending is whimsical and a bit unsatisfying; there's no crime-thriller, edge-of-the-seat finish. But despite the limp ending, the journey is well worth it.

[Linda · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book tracks the emmigrant experience, among other things. The protaginist, who has alienated himself from his ambitious wife, hires a Chinese contractor to repair the house that his wife has just vacated. One of the reasons she has left is that the house has never been repaired, renovated, remodeled or tidied up by her husband. I believe the setting of the novel is Seattle, and the gloom of the weather reflects the gloom our protagonist feels. (I have forgotten his name.) This book compares and contrasts nicely with TORTILLA CURTAIN.

[Ali · Rating 4 out of 5]

A larger than usual group. And we were so eager that we started talking before everyone had sat down. The feelings toward the book were mostly positive, thinking that it was a well-written description of Seattle during the heady dot-com era. It was put forward that it was actually an indictment of greedy Americans, and was written for a British audience, rather than an American one. And Bill called out the symbolism of the final scene, where the flock of waxwings descends on the tree, stripping it bare, before flying off to find another tree to denude.

[Julie · Rating 4 out of 5]

I first read _Waxwings_ shortly after it came out, and met Raban around the same time (I was volunteering at Seattle's now defunct BookFest).

It's a great story, full of interesting and complex characters. Was fun to read again, I had forgotten much of the story. Also enjoyable because of all the Seattle landmarks mentioned.

Raban lives here, and he had his character refer to the local zoo as "The Woodland Park Zoo". I don't think most locals think of it that way, they think of it as "the zoo".

[Wendy Feltham · Rating 4 out of 5]

Having recently moved to the Pacific Northwest, one way I'm learning about my new surroundings is through literature. Waxwings is a joyful and painful book that tells the tale of one moment in Seattle's recent history. Jonathan Raban moved from England to settle in Seattle, and his description of the dot-com boom and the perspective of two immigrants is fascinating. The flawed characters and the details about Seattle's neighborhoods are very real, and the interwoven elements of the plot and relationships among the characters are hilarious.

[Julia · Rating 3 out of 5]

A meandering collection of Seattle characters through most of it, tightening around Tom (a writer bearing some resemblance to the author) toward the end, but with a surprisingly meaningful and succinct ending that sneaks up on you. As a Seattleite who moved here just after the tech bubble burst, the descriptions of life here just before (the WTO riots, etc) are enlightening, though many small tells sprinkled throughout the book tell me that the author is not quite as up on the local lingo as a native or someone in the tech world would be. Still, enjoyable, and worth the read.

[juice · Rating 3 out of 5]

An ultimately disappointing book. It is beautifully written around a terrific idea, but it gets lost - quite badly - somewhere in the middle and never recovers. The front half is easily a four, but then it just trudges through to the finish. It's a touch ironic, given one of the main protagonists is a professor/author who is coming up dry for a new book idea/content...

Having said that, I'm going to look for more of his stuff, as the actual writing is terrific.

[Mark Dodson · Rating 3 out of 5]

Something about the first 20-30 pages of this wasn’t working for me, and I almost gave up on it. However, once I got a better sense of the characters it did get more interesting. The main 3 or 4 characters, who are mostly quite different, are all stressed and have some tense issues they’re up against. How they deal with each other and these issues is the story. Overall, a decent read. I just had some difficulty in the beginning getting a sense of where it was all going.