Mini Reviews

Assassin by Rye James

The writing seemed flat to me. Not much feeling behind it. There were also a lot of old western clichés. Something reminiscent of a western you would see on a Saturday afternoon and had pieces of other western plots you have probably heard before. He tried to build a lot on the characters and tricky plot points but at 100 pages there wasn’t much room for that so the characters just seemed to explain themselves a lot and they tell us stories more than we get to experience the story for ourselves. And at one point, to make the plot turn out, the character stepped out of character and the book lost some credibility. I was thinking ‘he can’t possibly make him that stupid, can he?’ But, unfortunately, he did and it played out like an easy fix to a tight plot point.




The Penelopiad: The Myth of Penelope and Odysseus by Margaret Atwood

I guess you have to give points for the idea of putting in a Greek chorus but after the first few had so many silly rhymes I was put off by the whole thing. As for the rest? Well, Penelope does tend to go on. Maybe I would be bitter too after her life and then how ever many years in the underworld. But I hope not because it turned Penelope into a terrible bore.