1929 by M. L. Gardner
My rating: 1 of 5 stars
I had my doubts two pages in, but I had a metro commute to kill. I tried to make a game out of seeing how many grammatical and historical errors I could spot, but couldn’t take it and resorted to staring out the window.
Black Tuesday did not instantly plunge millionaires into homelessness and hunger, but this book would have you believe brokers went home that day with all their property, down to the last silver candlestick, under bank lien. People were not doing swan dives out of high-rise buildings in droves, contrary to popular myth. Was this researched at all? No one was tossing the phrase “affordable housing” around for at least another sixty years and “slumlord” was not coined until the 50’s. Other reviewers have noted similar contextual errors.
The cardboard characters were bad enough, but why did all the names have to start with A or C? That made them even more interchangeable, and infodump backstories are annoying.
The Roaring Twenties and Great Depression are intriguing eras, and I love good historical fiction. This isn’t it, though. This story is clearly a soap opera with “history” as stage setting. I only got as far as page 25 but the contrived, amateurish writing and poor research are evident. I’m glad I got it free. Abandoning. (I do like the cover, though.)
99 Monkeys 