I received a kindle copy of Noise by Brett Garcia Rose free from NetGalley for fair review. It's a brutal story of a deaf man, Leon, searching for his lost sister. I gave it almost five stars.

She had left a suicide note & he hadn't heard from her for many years, until a cryptic postcard arrives from New York City. He travels there from South Carolina in his big, ugly gray Dodge truck that is a beast when it needed to be.

"It's one of those urban designs that would never be included by engineers in the South, where the only people who walk are derelicts & runaway children that no one wants back." That is a description that sets the mood for the story.

New York City is a different world than the one he left behind. "Everyone hurrying somewhere, merging with one another on the cold, wet streets. Merging, & dismissing, as only urbanites can."

The first time I rode the subway in New York, I could relate to the following description. "No one on the train looks at one another. The lights flicker on & off. People wait blankly, as if the train is a time machine, as if the commute itself is some form of cyro-sleep, the trip slowly, unknowingly, draining their lives away."

In searching for his sister, he interacts with Sara, a dancer who had known Lily, his sister. & the following conversation takes place.

"Half the time,' she says, 'You're wrong pretty often then.'

'Not wrong', I say. 'Incorrect.'

'There's a diifference?' she asks.

'There's a difference.'"

I've always been a stickler for semantics. I could really relate to this discussion. I believe in using the correct words for the correct situation.

"In the digital world of the Internet, files are living, breathing, moving things, & they always leave a trail, & often fully archived copies of themselves. If you knew where to look." Leon explains to Detective Rico. He's letting the detective know that his past actions will have consequences.

Rastov, a Russian mobster is the next to the last man standing in Leon's search for Lily. "A small gray rat of a man, with a filthy elegance that makes him all the more despicable." I don't know about the elegance, but the man was utterly despicable in word & deed.

"There's a theory that the deaf never leave the womb. That there is a part of us that never comes out. That if we were ever able to hear the world, we would implode at the onslaught, that we exist our entire lives, insulated & isolated, as we were at the beginning." That is one of the best analogies I've read about deafness. I'm not deaf, but hearing impaired. There are times in a public setting that I feel overwhelmed, bombarded by the cacaphony of sounds.

"Noise" is a force with which to be reckoned. The book kept me up turning the pages & I read it in one day.

To purchase link: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00KYY4MM4?ie=UTF8&creativeASIN=B00KYY4MM4&linkCode=xm2&tag=injoslifethin-20

 

 

 2.85 Stars

   

    I feel like the first line in the blurb describes Leon perfectly...
 
  "The world is an ugly place, and I can tell you now, I fit it just fine."

 

   Leon is such a sad man. It's hard not to pity a man who has but one ray of sunshine in a very bleak existence. Lily, Leon's sister, disappeared 10 years ago, presumed to be dead, until a cryptic anonymous message from someone saying that Lily was in New York city and in desperate need of help. From there this story evolves in to something very dark. The things Leon finds are not pretty, and the things he does in the name of love are even worse.

  

  "The world was not as we had imagined it to be, sister, not even close. The world is a cruel, bastard place, inhibited, every last inch, by predators and runners, Lily cold and lost somewhere, me hot and bleeding and swinging a hammer. Life as it is, not as we wish it to be."

  

 

   The world that Mr. Rose paints is indeed this dark and terrible beast, living, breathing, and devouring all the goodness inside of it. Leon stumbles across much more than he bargained for, but will stop at nothing until he finds his dear sister, or avenges her. Any in his wake will parish. As things go on this reads much like a shoot 'em up type script. Lines of right and wrong seemed blurred. While Leon certainly can not be considered a "hero" in the typical sense, he is definitely a dark avenger of sorts. And if he's the "good guy" all should tremble before the bad ones. They were a sick bunch of people, and it was hard not to root for Leon to unleash his street justice upon them all.

 

 

 

  And if that doesn't work...

 

 

   My only real complaint about Noise was that while I did feel pity for Leon, it was hard to feel much else, and forget about feeling anything for much of anyone else, sans disgust. I felt a little disconnected from the characters. I could clearly see their story, but I just couldn't invest much in any of them. No one was very fleshed out. You got a basic sense of the character, and that was it. Even the victim, Lily, was not enough to engage me fully. I felt bad for her plight, but she almost seemed surreal. Like she could just as easily been a figment of Leon's imagination, perhaps the better part, the last of his humanity.

 

   This was a heavy duty terminator type of story. A man on a mission, that made anyone in his way meet their maker. Lots of action in a relatively short amount of time. Fans of high adrenaline, shoot 'em up, blood and guts , and vigilante justice will most likely really enjoy this book.

I mostly enjoyed it, the writing was quite beautiful, in a dark way, at certain parts. But I need a little more connection with characters to rate a book any higher than this.

 

   I received a copy of this book from Velocity Imprints via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review