Helpful Score: 3
What an odd book. It has religious overtones, it's an obvious satire of health care, and then there are parts of it I just don't get at all. The first half of the book is amazing; the society reforming itself, coming to terms with things beyond their control or understanding, it's just brilliant. It then loses steam and becomes tedious. It is worth reading to the end but it wasn't the best book I read this year.
Helpful Score: 2
Eck! This book took FOREVER to finish! Absolutely forever. It was SO long and boring! The premise was interesting - the Flood happens again & rather than an ark, a ward of the hospital floats. But it was SO bogged down with medical terminology - the writer - who just finished his residency and is now at the Harvard Divinity School seems to have wrote this it to be a big, smarmy show-off. Now, the writing itself was all right, but all the adults died in the end without a lot of motivation... it seemed Adrian wrote himself into a corner and went out by the childish ending of "...and then they all died." Basically, all in all, it was NOT good.
Helpful Score: 1
Adrian's writing is beautiful...he is eloquent and the story flows well. Parts of the book, however, are difficult to follow. Adrian uses a lot of medical terminology, and while some of it may be common place (or known to readers who also enjoy medical dramas on TV!), many of the terms are not going to be recognized. There were also several times where a name would be mentioned, and I would have to try really hard to remember who that particular person was and what they meant to the story.
The main characters were fleshed out very well, their hopes, dreams, loves and fears, and the premise of the book is both terrifying and uplifting. I would definitely recommend this to people who don't need to rely on a sense of "reality" in their books.
The main characters were fleshed out very well, their hopes, dreams, loves and fears, and the premise of the book is both terrifying and uplifting. I would definitely recommend this to people who don't need to rely on a sense of "reality" in their books.
