Been a while since I’ve offered an opinion on a book but sometimes you run across one which is so intriguing, so fun, that you have to give it a shout out.  Afterwards, I’ll offer another review… at least of a book I tried and had to give up on…

First, the positive review:

Released early this year, Mur Lafferty’s Six Wakes is a really clever, enjoyable sci-fi book that reads like an Agatha Christie mystery, but set in outer space (for the most part).

The book is an interesting amalgam of Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None and, to some extent, Murder on the Orient Express.

And Then There Were None, perhaps Agatha Christie’s best known novels, involved a group of 10 strangers are brought together to a remote island and then they’re knocked off… one after the other, and the big mystery is who brought them here and why is this person killing them off.

Now take that general concept and have the main characters already killed off and their latest clone versions are awoken moments after the last of the original crew was murdered on a large vessel in deep space and have these “new” clones of the murder victims try to figure out who killed their previous selves… and why.

In this novel, one’s last stored memories are imported into the fresh clones and in the case of the people aboard the ship, the last memories are from when they boarded the vessel some 24 years before.  They have no idea what happened between then and now, and the mystery of which one of them -one or more!- were involved in the ghastly murders committed and why.

As I mentioned above, the book also had some similarity to Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express, but to delve into that aspect would be a little too spoilery so I’ll just bite my tongue.

By the way, though there are similarities in concept, this is absolutely NOT a negative but rather a compliment. My admiration for the works of Ms. Christie is high and for me to put this book in that sphere is indeed a compliment.

The only negative I would give the book is that in the early chapters things take a little bit to get going and the back and forth between the present and sometimes very distant past got a little confusing given we’re introduced to many characters almost at once.  However, when you have a grip on who’s who, things really click.

Recommended!

Now, the book I didn’t make it through…

Stephen King is arguably the most popular novelist today, having sold many millions of copies of his books over the years and having not only released a staggering number of works, but also having a staggering number of them be made either for the movies or TV.

So I don’t feel too terribly bad giving one of his novels a big thumb’s down.

Joyland sounded really interesting, based on the description on the back of the book.  The time frame the story took place in, for the most part the early 1970’s, was also intriguing to me as I was a very young child at the time and was curious to read a story set in and around that era.

But the book, unfortunately, proved dull and off-putting.

I managed to get some 60+ pages into it when I decided enough was enough.  The book purports to be a mystery/thriller with supernatural elements but what it really appears to be is Mr. King doing a thinly veiled growing up/maturing story… and it proved a real chore to read.

If you’re doing a story about someone growing up, then try to make the character interesting and the main character in this novel, at least to the point where I read it, is more annoying than interesting.  Love sick and blue balled (pardon the expression, but its a fact of the book) by a girlfriend we’re told early on is about to abandon him and then, for sixty pages, we keep coming back to her and his feelings for her and it… is… soooooo… irritating.

I recommend Six Wakes.  Can’t say the same about Joyland.