Nothing to Lose? Wrong.
Another WordPress blogger, HappyKlam, has already used the title I wanted to use — Nothing to Lose But Your Time.
I’ve lost time wasted reading this book. I’ve lost enthusiasm for the next book. At least I didn’t lose any money since I borrowed the book (which is odd since I almost never borrow books).
Nothing To Lose is Lee Child’s latest Jack Reacher novel. As I’ve said before, I love the Reacher novels. The stories are engaging from the very start. I simply have to know what happens next and very little will make me put down a Reacher novel. I like Jack Reacher. I want to know him even though it would only be briefly before he moves on. He stands for justice and doing the right thing. He takes care of people and fixes problems. He reminds me of military men I’ve known. He seems real to me.
But …
This last book was a huge disappointment. I kept hoping that it would get better. I kept hoping that the conclusions I was coming to were wrong. Hopes were dashed.
The story was a confusing piece of propaganda.
***spoiler alert! ***
I simply can’t believe that Jack Reacher would let US military deserters go. (By the way, Canada is not a haven for deserters. Canada has started to send them back, finally.) It feels false and that ruins the book. That’s outside the realm of suspension of disbelief. And why did Reacher not simply reach out and get information from someone within the military. He’s done it before.
This book is anti-Iraq war and anti-US military in a heavy-handed way. I wanted escapist fiction not a moonbat parable. It didn’t even make sense. Why were the town people united against outsiders? Why would Thurman make such a great effort to return the “remains” of military casualties but allow the TBI hospital to be so nasty? Why would Thurman explode a shipping container-sized dirty bomb in the US?
Ugh.
I warned you…the first half of the book was good but approached moonbattery as you reached the end…I kept hoping it wasn’t going to go that way.
Also the size of the compound was unrealistic. The military station outside the compund made no sense. There were a lot of things in this story that made it impossible to suspend my disbelief. Going back and forth into and out of Despair was a bit ridiculous. I read this one quickly because I was engaged but I wa also hoping that it was going to have a logical conclusion. The girlfriends with deserters was weird and didn’t add anything to the story except anti-war sentiment.
I’m going to immediately re-read one of the older books to get back the good Jack Reacher feeling.
This is the first Jack Reacher book I read and I loved every minute of it and have now read almost all the others. It made perfect sense to me because he clearly explained all the whys and whatfors eventually. If you didn’t like the book maybe you stopped paying good attention, like to why the military installation was there.
One of the things I appreciate about Child’s writing style is that he does not let you get lost in all the threads. He hooks you back up neatly when it starts to get pretty deep, when it gets complicated and you could get confused. A lot of authors don’t do that; then you have to go back and think really hard and figure out where you got lost. Child does it for you right when it’s needed.
Another example is that he is very CLEAR about his pronouns and so on, so you aren’t wondering which “he” did what. I toss out a book that does that to me. Bad writing.
The place where he DIAGRAMS in words the layout of the room full of badguys in the book about Indiana and the stonecrushers is a good example of that clarity.
What I don’t understand is what am I gonna do when there are no more unread Reachers and I gotta wait till spring 2009??? Yikes.
The military check point outside the compound made no sense. The transporting of soldier-dust by plane every night made no sense. Blowing up a dirty bomb made no sense and the shear size of the breaking compund made no sense. I love Lee Child and I have liked all of his other books, but this one was just strange. And the whole deserter thing was really a red herring.
I really hope that the next one is better.