A special thank you to Edelweiss and HarperCollins for an ARC in exchange for an honest review.

Not my favourite of Shriver's work, in fact, I struggled with even finishing. A futuristic dystopian story is an acquired taste and not really at the top of my heap, so I guess your are wondering why I even requested this title. The truth is, I find Shriver brilliant and her works fascinating and couldn't wait to get my hands on this. Unfortunately, it totally missed the mark. It is too heavy on the economics and the reader is bogged down with way too much detail; this should've been the backdrop of the story, not forefront.

There was a lack of character development partly because there are so many characters, and partly because she simply covers too much ground, thus the story becomes ineffective and misses the mark. I did appreciate her cheeky humour, but feel I may have missed a lot of the subtle nuances that make Shriver great because I simply checked out.

http://girlwellread.blogspot.com/2016/06/the-mandibles-by-lionel-shriver.html

This book tells the tale of the economic collapse in the US in 2029. Cabbage is $20 a head.  The robots were once called “bots” but they’ve taken over so many jobs, they’re now called “robs”. Showers are taken once a week to save water.  There’s a new global currency, the “bancor”.  The US President announces that the government is defaulting on all loans.  Banks shut down and accounts are frozen.  Inflation is out of control leading to chaos.  The government demands that citizens turn over all gold to them.  Unfortunately, this whole story is far too believable.

 

Great Grand Man is 97 years old. The Mandible family (and there are a lot of family members) is waiting for him to die so they can inherit his sizeable fortune.  But now not only has that fortune vanished, but they must struggle to survive.  A new world is born and the author does a fabulous job of describing the changes.  There is a truly chilling scene of the army coming into a home with metal detectors searching for hidden gold, with the threat of prison and a $250,000 fine should they find any.  The book takes the family through to 2047 where what’s left of the family ends up in the United States of Nevada.

 

This is written as a satire and with a dry wit. It’s a very clever book.  I chose this book because I thought “We Need to Talk About Kevin” was such a powerful book so I was anxious to read her newest effort.  This is a very different type of book.  Although I’ve read reviews saying that the book is slow to start, I enjoyed the first quarter of the story very much but by the time I was half way through, I began to lose interest.  I thought the book went on far too long and had made its point early on and the rest was just repetitive.  The author does such an excellent job in detailing human reaction to these disturbing events that I wish she could have curbed some of the social commentary and long financial lessons that just seemed to bog the book down.

 

This book was given to me by the publisher through Edelweiss in return for an honest review.

Unusually huge fire ants terrorize Tampa, Florida. Will anyone survive this plague?

Mandibles is a creature feature by Jeff Strand about large fire ants overrunning Tampa. That's pretty much it. It follows the lives of office works, people in a dentist office, a couple stickup men, and an entomologist during the rampage of the ants. 

It might be that I've come to expect home runs at every at-bat from Jeff Strand but this one didn't make me want to sit outside his house and "pretend" to run into him so we could eventually be best friends like a lot of his other books.

I love the premise but the characters didn't really do it for me this time. In my opinion, for a story like this, there needs to be a couple strong central characters to build the story around. Since this one had a death rate per page equivalent to a George R.R. Martin book, there was no one to root for for every long. It seemed like the characters I cared about the least were the ones to make it to the end. Also, I thought the ending was kind of weak and the source of the ants didn't make that much logical sense.

Still, it was a fun read for the most part. People getting stung and eaten by fire ants of unusual size was pretty entertaining and they made a believably frightening enemy. Unstoppable fire ants the size of squirrels (and larger)? No thank you, sir.

Three stars and Strand had to work hard for every one in this outing. I guess I can't be mad at him for not being perfect, though.

Jeff Strand + thumb-sized fire ants = gold!

I took off a star mainly because the first third of the book was a bit disjointed and ran like a misfiring roadster. It was a bit disconcerting to say the least to be following several story lines only to find out that one of them, for no apparent reason, took place 8 years before the other action in the book. The prologue, although amusing, really didn't relate to the story. It was like a really good movie that suffered from bad editing. It leveled off after that and was smooth and fast to the conclusion, although I could have used a bit more back-story as to how and why anyone wanted to create a large breed of vicious ants in the first place. As with the other books by Strand that I have read, the writing is smooth, the dialogue witty, and the story was compelling--exciting even. I will also say that as soon as I finished this I bought two more Jeff Strand books on Kindle. He is one of those authors that I will read absolutely everything he writes.