Losing it! (Snow White and the Seven Samurai - Tom Holt)

Member Name: Pingu

Product:	Snow White and the Seven Samurai - Tom Holt
Date:	07/09/00 (37 review reads)
Rating:

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I used to really like Tom Holt's style of writing. His first few books were brilliant, if a little formulaic; take a myth, fairy story or legend, and bring it up to date; make the ineffable ordinary. Thus in several books God has been a sort of superior mechanic, and the chariot of the Sun God is diesel driven, hell is a corporation, etc. etc.

But it has been wearing thin for a long time. Whereas Terry Pratchett's style has developed from being very similar to this, to dealing more and more with people's psyches, Tom Holt is simply churning out more and more of exactly the same stuff.

This time it's fairy tale land, and the whole thing is actually run by a computer operating system, called Mirrors, with the main server being in the Wicked Queen's castle. And that's it! It's pretty much a one joke book. Holt pedantically excavates every little nuance of the metaphor that he can....very pedantically. He goes for the slightly whacky approach of simply throwing lots and lots of people into the mix, and letting all their plots develop in parallel, but the eventual tying together is extremely unsatisfying, and you might be forgiven for not knowing whether there was, eventually, a plot at all.

If you haven't read much Holt, then you might find this book very funny. But if you have, then you will find it extremely tiresome.

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