Monday, June 10, 2013

Rock, Paper, Tiger

I was inclined to give up on Lisa Brackman's Rock, Paper, Tiger about 20 pages in, feeling like it was a thriller that used pushing the protagonist from one location to another in lieu of an actual plot.  But I stuck with it, feeling like some actual development was going on.  Sadly, the joke was on me, and the story didn't actually go anywhere.  At just about any point after p. 30, I could've jumped to the last chapter and it would have made as much sense.

Ellie the protagonist has some character development, but that, too, stalls out in the middle 2/3 of the novel.  She's very passive, and so she gets pushed around from place to place, but it all feels very purposeless.  Lastly, the Uighur maguffin turns out to be completely meaningless; we never learn out why/whether he was important.

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