The Abominable: by Dan Simmons

I read recently that you should NEVER score a book low, because in fact in the future, that may come back to bite you. Well then what’s the crap point of having an opinion???!! One thing I will always do, except, I really hate any kind of confrontation so as long as I am invisible I as safe, is have a very unfortunately usually unpopular opinion.

Okay! Dan Simmons is an amazing author, and I’m at a loss to describe how he became a mountaineer expert, but that’s exactly what he did. Unfortunately for us, the eager audience, we are also meant to be mountaineer experts. At first, yes, we want to understand the terms. Woo. Then later, HALF the book has gone by. One might wonder…

Well wonder no more!! It is PURE 1920’s mountain-climbing at it’s purest, and, I happen to have been previously interested in the real-life disappearance of George Mallory and Sandy Irvine, whose fictional spectres make a huge part of this book, and again due to the author’s own skill, keeps you reading…

But. When the book is 3/4 through and you realize you’ve been taken for a loooooong mountaineering ride, you start to be a little irritated. What happens in the last 3/4? I am NOT in the business of revealing plot, BUT. Let’s just say we blame it all on the Nazi’s, and one page on Hitler’s assumed crimes (we can really blame the man for anything no?) is so disgusting and vile, I would have rather not read any of it at all. So. Unless you are the MOST
Mountaineering expert EVER! And you are SO interested in what it might have been like to climb Everest in 1924, this book is simply a waste of every human’s time. HAVE YOU SEEN HOW LONG IT IS??? I read all of it. You are welcome, if you really need a spoiler of the nasty vile Hitler-esq crux only revealed in the last 20 pages, to ask me via message and I will save you some time. Let’s just say I was REALLY holding out for Bigfoot.

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The author is mad-talented, this was a horrid waste of paper.

About Deanne

I was born and raised out on the fringes of the rainy Pacific Northwest on fishing boats and cold beaches with only a dog and kittens for company, and so my love of reading and creating stories started very early. My dad would illustrate my early stories and I would listen to him ramble about European history and warfare, eagerly asking questions about Kings, Queens and our own family history. In my adult life I am wife to a brilliant and hilarious web designer and mother to two wonderfully weird children whom I am trying to pass on to my love of learning about the world. I'm an amateur genealogist, amateur photographer and amateur history major haha. I'm good at doing amateur stuff lol. During the last couple years I finally turned my life-long urge to write into a serious endeavor and finished my first novel called (for now) The Stone and the Stars, about a dying dystopian society, and one girl trying to escape it before it collapses. While I finish cleaning up the edges on my novel for the umpteenth time, and before I send it out into the world, I've lately begun a novel about utopia, this time on Earth. I'm finally living up to the nerdy book-worm title my family 'lovingly' pinned on me from the time I was small, and finally doing that one thing I feel like I was born to do. Cliche and silly? Yes!
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