A Great Start - Shame About the Finish! (The Lake House - James Patterson)

Name: DavyMichelle

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Product:	The Lake House - James Patterson
Date:	07.05.08 (30 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: A Great Start

Disadvantages: A Terrible Finish

James Patterson is most famous for his detective crime thrillers starring Alex Cross but this book is something a bit different. It's still a detective crime thriller really but it's been well mixed with a dose of science fiction too. The result in my mind is an excellent original storyline that was only let down by the writing standard.


The Lake House is all about six kids who start the story off at the centre of a unique custody battle. These kids aren't really brothers and sisters but they've raised as such because until now - they were a group of scientific experiments that their biological parents thought were dead. Their strange 'gifts' mean they need to be with one another, and with the people who rescued them, but of course their biological parents are fighting to have their offspring home with them.


The gifts the kids have are convincing to a point though I'm not so sure about the scientific theory behind each of them. The way these kids grow up to know so much having never before seen the light of day is a bit weird and inconsistent too. It's one of those "great in theory, not so great in practice" kind of concepts I think.


So the story starts out really promisingly with a fantastic unique storyline that I can't say I can really liken to anything else I've read. But then with the custody case resolved, there's not much else that happens in the book. It's all about one single storyline with no twists or turns and nothing to really keep the reader's interest.


I think the idea is we're supposed to be left guessing whether or not everyone will 'get out alive' but frankly, I didn't care. There was so little going on in the remainder of the book that I have to admit to skim reading a lot of the second half. I don't usually do that but I found this so boring I felt I had no other choice.


As a James Patterson fan, especially of the Alex Cross books, I found this really a bit disappointing. I think I do recommend it for something to read if you come across it cheap at a car boot sale or something because the story starts out so originally. But because of the way it drags in the second half I'm only giving it three stars out of five.


Product Details:

Available online or in stores for around £5.99
416 pages
Headline Book Publishing

Summary: Worth a Flick Through