The Crown of Thorns by Ian CP Irvine

Rating: WARTY!

From an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher.

You know when a book has 'Book One' on the front cover that it's not really a story - it's merely a prologue and I don't do prologues as such. This is why I don't do series because, and with very few exceptions, they're inevitably tedious. This one - about cloning the fictional Jesus from the equally fictional crown of thorns - sounded like it might be interesting if it were done right, but the story never began.

Instead of unfolding a story, it rambled interminably, incessantly, indeterminately all over the place, going everywhere except where it was supposedly going. It began with a prologue! Then chapter one was also a prologue, and chapter two wasn't far off being one. That ought to have warned me off it right there, but foolishly, I pressed on for a little while. This is the problem with a series.

I gave up reading somewhere shortly into part two (the author seems to have confused parts with chapters and chapters with sections). I took to skimming thereafter, to see if the story ever actually got started at any point. It did not - at least not up to around the halfway point. The main character seemed far more focused on having sex with his girlfriend than ever he was in cloning anything. I cannot commend this based on my experience of it. I reviewed another Irvine novel back in March and it was equally lacking in entertainment value, so I'm not only done with this novel but with this author, too.

London 2012 What If? by Ian CP Irvine

Rating: WARTY!

This is a time-travel story, so we're told ("A Romantic Time Travel Thriller"), but in fact it's really not. It's a parallel universe story. There's no time travel involved. I'm drawn to time-travel stories, so I thought this might be interesting, but I was quickly disappointed. This was so poorly-written that I couldn't get into it. The main character is in a mid-life crisis, bored with life and doubting everything, so predictably, one morning, he does a George bailey, and ends up in a parallel world. All the station names seem wrong, and the place he was going to doesn't exist despite his having visited it many times.

There comes a point at which your disorientation at something like this happening, has to give way to a practical approach - or at least to a realization that something is profoundly off, and you need to stop and take stock, but all too often, people in these stories seem to be so determinedly stupid that they take forever to adjust to the fact that everything has changed. This guy reacts by vomiting repeatedly, which was nauseating to read about. Worse than this, though, was that he could never get it through his thick skull that things had switched around dramatically. He keeps thinking, notwithstanding how compellingly different are the things he's already experienced, that other things will be exactly the same - like that he will be married to the same person and live at the same address.

It was this tedious drunken pirouette the author insisted on taking us through repeatedly that turned me off the story. No one can be that stupid and have made it to adulthood. One of the big things discussed in the text is how the phone service companies are different - some he was familiar have not yet started up or never did start up, while there are others he's never heard of, but conveniently, his phone works perfectly when he needs it to, and fails him dismally when the author wants to inject a hiccup into his story. It was unrealistic, and after a very short time I gave up trying to follow the story and moved onto something I hoped would be more entertaining.

I have better things to do with my time and could not stand to waste any more of it on this haphazard and poorly-constructed story.