Plot or Premise

Six years after Jurassic Park turned into a human slaughter by rampaging dinosaurs during a storm, the chaos theorist Ian Malcolm is back to join a rich academic in visiting Site B, a nearby island that was the production facility for the original Park’s dinosaurs.

What I Liked

The story is a bit of a retread of the original, with a bit of added mystery of what happened at the site that is now long dormant. There is a bit new in the ways that the dinosaurs interact and less about “how” they were created from the first book.

What I Didn’t Like

I have three significant problems with the text. First and foremost, Ian Malcolm supposedly died during the first book, and I can overlook his resurrection for this book, except after having experienced severe trauma from being near dinosaurs, he voluntarily goes back into the dinosaur world with no obvious sense of fear or even foreboding. He’s almost as naïve as the original Hammond from book 1. Secondly, the book reads almost like a documentary on the feeding habits of a group of cows. There is virtually NO menace for the first 60% of the book. Ian knows better, the rest may not, but mostly it is just a bunch of aggressive dinosaurs walking past the humans with nary a sniff. Lastly, there is a giant “mystery” of how certain animals ended up in a specific nest area. They couldn’t have got there on their own and other dinosaurs couldn’t have lured or moved them there. But in the end, the blasé explanation of how the dinosaurs died doesn’t answer how they ended up where they did. Nor any other history of the island. It’s still well-written, but there are some gaping plot holes that make no sense at all.

The Bottom Line

Good writing but about as exciting as watching cows eat grass

Plot or Premise

A rich industrialist with a vision creates a safari park on a secluded island for tourists, where the main attraction will be dinosaurs brought back to life through advanced DNA sequencing.

What I Liked

It’s a bit hard to read the book without comparing it to the successful movie franchise that was built on the book. But the imagination to not only conceive of a dinosaur park for tourists and to conceive of a realistic way to make the science sound feasible even in 1990 (pulling dinosaur DNA from a long-dead mosquito trapped in amber) was simply fabulous to see.

Not surprisingly, the book is different from the movie (or more accurately, the movie diverges from the book), but a lot of the core elements are the same. An underappreciated computer nerd, a worried security chief, the storm that turns the island into a death trap, etc.

What I Didn’t Like

Overall, I didn’t feel any sense of wonder in the book. In the movie, for example, you could see the sense of “OMG these are dinosaurs” and the characters are wowed out of their socks. In the book, it is more like, “Cool, but let’s talk about using night-vision goggles to see them, that’s really interesting.” I didn’t feel the wonder of any of them.

In addition, some parts were a bit odd — Grant is a loner bachelor but loves children (hates them in the movie, a better choice); Grant and the kids drift on the river with nothing much happening and tend to get back way too safely; the kids have Wesley-Crusher-syndrome and are able to get the computers working again; Hammond is almost a buffoon more than a visionary; and the ending is more about strange relations with Costa Rica, and a “final solution” than getting away from the raptors. Overall, I saw lots of edits that were done to the story from the book in order to put it on screen, and most of what they cut were good edits. I didn’t feel like the book was so much “more” than the movie, perhaps even a bit less.

The Bottom Line

Great book but some of the movie edits made the story better

Plot or Premise

A private investigator in L.A. investigates the death of her uncle, an old stand-up comic.

What I Liked

The main character, Mary Cooper, is an unfiltered voice in a world of serious investigators. Every line out of her mouth is practically a one-liner, and while that SHOULD grate on the nerves, it doesn’t. Just about everyone in the book is a comic, and the lines come fast and furious at different points. Once you buy into the premise, it’s quite enjoyable. I originally tripped over this story when it was shared online in a newsgroup, and I had no way of knowing at the time it was actually a nom de plume for Dan Ames.

What I Didn’t Like

There is a scene right in the middle where a bunch of guys basically go to rape Mary while wearing masks. Except their identity is relatively obvious to everyone except Mary, before and after the attempt, and the reason for their behaviour doesn’t even make any sense, at least not towards Mary. No to mention some stupid interactions with a police sergeant that keeps escalating, even though the cop is really ambitious and it’s going to blow up in her face, more Keystone Kops than by the book.

The Bottom Line

Funny dialogue, a couple of plot holes