All Cry Chaos should have been a natural book for me to love. A thriller based around the mathematics of chaos theory is right up my alley. And, indeed, I liked it, but it had some nagging issues that kept me from really loving it.
Author Jonathon Rosen has a nice breezy style when explaining the basics of fractals (though it's a bit rough around the edges). Unfortunately, somewhere along the way, he loses the fact that chaos means that you can't arbitrarily predict things, even with the right equations, because you're limited by the accuracy of your starting point. It's a somewhat academic point, but it means that his characters shouldn't be able to game the stock market as much as they do, even granting an equation which could predict prices.
Another issue that bothered me was the American-centric nature of the writing. The main character French, but he thinks, for example, that a person has "eyes like Charles Manson," or hair like Ronald Reagan's. It's pretty jarring, though it probably wouldn't work to put in the French equivalent of Manson -- I and most of the audience wouldn't know who that person is. Instead, a simile without reference to a person would've been a better bet.
On the other hand, the plot moves reasonably well. Rosen tries to bring some philosophical depth to the story with musings on the nature of math, society, and God, although it didn't feel integral to the story.
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