Brother in the land reveiw (Brother in the Land - Robert Swindells)

Member Name: Jon C******

Product:	Brother in the Land - Robert Swindells
Date:	21/06/09 (102 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: descriptive

Disadvantages: terrible ending

The book brother in the land describes a nuclear holocaust and the effect it would have on a 14ish year old boy. The book was written by Robert Swindells.
The book starts off well and is very descriptive, you can clearly see how good the authors imagination is by the way that he writes the book. He uses short paragraphs well but I don't think this book needed short paragraphs as they made the book very slow to read and not very smooth. As a result of this it didn't flow as well as it could/ should have done.
The book as I have said is descriptive and Robert Swindells makes us "live" through Danny (one of the main characters, along with Kim and Ben) and you can really get engrossed in the book. Every detail is well written and thought through but saying this, the book could have been twice as long and just as good if not better.
The ending of the book really lets the book down. The original ending happens when you are just really into the book. So it just stops and you are left with a feeling of major disappointment because you think that it needs to be continued, maybe a sequel a few years after, but Robert Swindells hasn't to date written a sequel and probably won't. He did however carry on this book with a new very short chapter which looked like it had taken 5 minutes to write. In the new chapter the two young people Kim and Danny carry on their story. They find an island off the coast of mainland Britain called holy island where they "live happily ever after" Which is very unrealistic. The truth is that they would die of hunger or starvation or radiation poisoning, because if a bomb was dropped on nearly all the center of population there would be massive quantities of radiation everywhere they went. The newer ending was only 2/3 pages longer than the older one so it really wasn't worth bothering to write the extra paragraph as it didn't really add anything to the story and it just carried on the disappointment. The book had great potential to be a great book and in the end it wasn't (in my opinion) even a good book.

Summary: A ok book spoilt by its ending(s)