Book Reviews and Thoughts :: The world of Books and Literature

I like most books. You have to write a book real bad to make me dislike it. Isabel Allende did that.

City of the Beasts is a story of a fifteen-year-old boy who is sent to his adventurous, gruff, and harsh grandmother for a while. The book begins with the boy’s reaction to the decision of moving to his grandmother’s house and the illness of his mother, which is interesting at that point. However, halfway through the book you realize that the earlier part was disconnected and not required at all. Anyhow, the adventurous grandmother takes the unwilling boy on a writing assignment to Amazon. That’s where the fun begins, supposedly.

The book is full of tired thrills, mystical shamanic totems, fantastic beings, and eccentric characters. The story is simple and is backed by fairly intriguing happenings. Nevertheless, at places it is plain juvenile. The author fails to make her characters real. The lack of practicality in normal characters and presence of tons of mystical fantastic characters acts as a negative for the book. There is also the standard mystery of ‘guess who is the bad guy’, but one does not even feel like guessing thanks to the disconnected events.

The author has also tried to combine the mystical fantasy world with the shrewd real world and failed horribly at it. We hop from the numinous world of people of mist to the cunning beings killing each other for money and transition did not work for me.

All the same, it is a book. You can always go ahead and read it. Right? Let me know if you like the book.