I know he is a stellar name, and I know that I will be in the minority on this one, and I really wanted the first reading experience of this exercise to be a positive one, but I just didn't get it.
Even though the book is comparatively short, I struggled to finish it - three weeks or so since I started, and it is only 246 pages! I really hoped that something centred around the most traumatic even of this young century thus far would stir my emotions. It didn't, except to annoy me that something that sounded so good could be so damned dull.
It is hard to know where to start, but among the problems were the dreary plotlines, uninteresting people, and the rage and frustration I felt the author's apparent reluctance to use proper names - pronouns just about all the way through, so it is near to impossible to know who is talking, who is being talked about, and who is doing what. The chronological jumping around didn't help with the clarity either. I felt rather a dullard not knowing what was going on until I realised that I didn't really care that much. Perhaps the purposeful vagueness had a point, but I must have missed it.
The only characters that were at all interesting were the terrorists, and the glimpses into their minds were profound on occasion. The last chapter, the one which describes the events inside the tower once the planes had hit, was another of the few highlights, and to actually have an interesting chapter as the last one made it doubly pleasurable for me to finish this volume.
My evaluation: 3 out of 10.
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