joelevard's review
2.0
I keep taking a chance on all these low-profile, high concept genre books and I keep coming away disappointed. Shelve this one next to [b:14|15062217|14|Peter Clines|http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1338999953s/15062217.jpg|20716929] and [b:The World House|7405143|The World House (The World House #1)|Guy Adams|http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1348287494s/7405143.jpg|7513441] in the trilogy of books about weird parallel dimensions intersecting with our world, populated by character's whose blandness is matched only by their unlikeability. Populating the books I mean. Not the parallel dimensions. Which are populated nothing as interesting as the jacket copy might lead you to believe.
kaileyjane's review
2.0
The concept was promising but the execution left something to be desired. Ultimately it was quite a boring read.
books17's review
3.0
An interesting read. I had literally no idea what the book was about when I picked it up (for some reason I had this preconception that it was post-apocalyptic? I have no idea), but it turned out to be a sort of neat modern fantasy about parallel worlds/universes/thematrix.
Some good characterisation and some neat concepts, not bad for a quick read.
Some good characterisation and some neat concepts, not bad for a quick read.
mentat_stem's review
5.0
longer review on mentatjack.com, but this is the meat:
The titular briar patch offers us views of very unlikely worlds. Time and presumably other aspects of physics behave differently. Mermaids and Giants and vampires and more that would become central to a more run of the mill novel become part of the scenery. This meta world next door to ours is introduced as a convenient, if dangerous and somewhat eccentric, method for avoiding rush hour traffic. It’s more than that and the scenery makes a point of not staying flatly in the background.
The characters include a ghost, a magic car and its driver, a depressed and jaded immortal, a sociopath, a doppelganger and an explorer. Fitting each of the characters into the above mentioned pigeon holes, is a fun exercise for the reader. There’s also the central character of Darrin and his college buddy Nicholas. All the characters are actively seeking something. They manipulate and are manipulated. They find shortcuts in the briarpatch. Relationships solidify and crumble. Darrin is seeking to understand why his girlfriend left him and then, a few months later, committed suicide by jumping off of the Golden Gate Bridge. This central mystery introduces him to the larger cast of characters. Once everyone’s role is understood, the briar patch gives everything a good shake and we get to see exactly who gets what they’re seeking.
Suicide and Cult are both mentioned on the back cover of Briarpatch. Death is a big issue wrestled with in the novel and more than one character are stuck like a broken record in the denial stage of grieving. Their lives are defined by those that they’ve lost. The implications of immortality are explored and fit nicely into the structure of the narrative. What does someone who can’t die fear? Just as the briarpatch lies outside of our consensus reality, each character, whether obsessed with life or obsessed with death, offers us something to think about what lies beyond our current existence. These are weighty issues, offering much for contemplation, but there’s plenty of action and exploration (and sex and food and photography) along the way.
The first 1/2 of the novel involves most of the characters confused and disconnected and the narrative structure mirrors this confusion. The story is presented non-linearly and almost every character gets a point of view scene. Later as everyone has a bit more clue about what’s going on, the story settles into smaller group of point of view characters and proceeds in a more straight forward march toward the final conflicts. There’s a portion of the second half that provides a relatively short montage of months of travel in the briarpatch. It works infinitely better than just saying “X months later,” but I suspect an entire series of novels could fill that space like the real numbers between 2 integers. This is my favorite Pratt so far and I’d recommend it to anyone who likes their fantasy mixed with contemporary reality, but is searching for something more (and weirder) than the typical urban fantasy.
The titular briar patch offers us views of very unlikely worlds. Time and presumably other aspects of physics behave differently. Mermaids and Giants and vampires and more that would become central to a more run of the mill novel become part of the scenery. This meta world next door to ours is introduced as a convenient, if dangerous and somewhat eccentric, method for avoiding rush hour traffic. It’s more than that and the scenery makes a point of not staying flatly in the background.
The characters include a ghost, a magic car and its driver, a depressed and jaded immortal, a sociopath, a doppelganger and an explorer. Fitting each of the characters into the above mentioned pigeon holes, is a fun exercise for the reader. There’s also the central character of Darrin and his college buddy Nicholas. All the characters are actively seeking something. They manipulate and are manipulated. They find shortcuts in the briarpatch. Relationships solidify and crumble. Darrin is seeking to understand why his girlfriend left him and then, a few months later, committed suicide by jumping off of the Golden Gate Bridge. This central mystery introduces him to the larger cast of characters. Once everyone’s role is understood, the briar patch gives everything a good shake and we get to see exactly who gets what they’re seeking.
Suicide and Cult are both mentioned on the back cover of Briarpatch. Death is a big issue wrestled with in the novel and more than one character are stuck like a broken record in the denial stage of grieving. Their lives are defined by those that they’ve lost. The implications of immortality are explored and fit nicely into the structure of the narrative. What does someone who can’t die fear? Just as the briarpatch lies outside of our consensus reality, each character, whether obsessed with life or obsessed with death, offers us something to think about what lies beyond our current existence. These are weighty issues, offering much for contemplation, but there’s plenty of action and exploration (and sex and food and photography) along the way.
The first 1/2 of the novel involves most of the characters confused and disconnected and the narrative structure mirrors this confusion. The story is presented non-linearly and almost every character gets a point of view scene. Later as everyone has a bit more clue about what’s going on, the story settles into smaller group of point of view characters and proceeds in a more straight forward march toward the final conflicts. There’s a portion of the second half that provides a relatively short montage of months of travel in the briarpatch. It works infinitely better than just saying “X months later,” but I suspect an entire series of novels could fill that space like the real numbers between 2 integers. This is my favorite Pratt so far and I’d recommend it to anyone who likes their fantasy mixed with contemporary reality, but is searching for something more (and weirder) than the typical urban fantasy.
jayshay's review
3.0
I like the twisty world and the nicely thorny characters. It did feel like half a book though. By the end it seemed to be just getting going. (Though this might be because Pratt is interested in different things than your standard fantasy.)
archergal's review
3.0
I thought this book had a really interesting concept (the briarpatch) in service to a fairly ordinary plot. Maybe it's the intro to a series?
Perhaps we'll see more of Darrin and the others in another volume. Not sure I'll make another trip with them, tho.
Perhaps we'll see more of Darrin and the others in another volume. Not sure I'll make another trip with them, tho.
areaxbiologist's review
5.0
Bay Area! Fantasy! Mythology! Immortal bad guys! How much more awesome can this get? It starts with cultish-suicides off the Golden Gate and morphs into a Philip K. Dick-esque romp in parallel worlds. I think the Wendigo is my favorite.
strangethyme's review
3.0
I really wish this book was written as well as the last 1/4 of it, because it might have been a 5. It's nice, fun, not too dense or anything, but I just didn't really care about the story until the end, so it was kind of hard to stick with. But over all, i did enjoy it. It has some really fantastic elements to it, and I like the characters.
bibliotropic's review
4.0
The concept of the briarpatch is an interesting one. A parallel world, or series of parallel worlds, that contain the improbable and implausible, tenuously holding to an existence that few can see unaided. Pratt takes the ‘alternate world’ concept and runs with it in a direction that I don’t see done that often. It’s noteworthy that he not only did this in a way that is believable, following its own rules and reasons, but also in such a way that still even the experts on the briarpatch don’t really know what it is, can only guess at its true nature. While I like understanding the weirder aspects of speculative fiction, I can definitely appreciate it when large-scale things don’t get boiled down to something simple. Reality is a hard thing to understand, even reality as we know it. Why should an alternate reality be less so?
While the characters were not particularly deep as far as development goes, they were still realistically done, so I can’t complain too loudly about them. They were more than just archetypes, but there were times that they felt flat, as though their whole lives were about the things going on between the pages at that time. It kept the reader very centred on current events, however, so this isn’t entirely a bad thing. Still, as characters can really make or break a book, a little more development might not have gone amiss.
Though oddly, it was the characters of Ismael and Echo that were the most developed. Ismael I can see, because he’s a very major player in the plot, trying to reach the light of a better world by exploiting people he himself sends to their deaths. He’s a complex man who has lived for centuries, full of obsessions and quirks and a rich sense of what I can only describe as “completeness.” Echo, too, was one of the more fleshed-out characters, though she existed mostly as Ismael’s tool. She didn’t allow herself to remain a tool, however, and was a powerful opportunist. While I can’t say that I liked her as a person, she was quite an interesting power, and she had a bit of an ethical turnaround while still staying true to her nature.
For all Pratt’s demonstrated creativity in coming up with the details of the briarpatch and alternate realities and how they work, he did commit one of the major writer no-no’s by telling rather than showing. Characters sitting down and telling somebody their backstory, or taking a chapter to explain how they met so-and-so, got so frequent that I couldn’t help but roll my eyes a time or two. Once or twice might be excusable. But there were times where a few sentences could have done just as well as an entire chapter, and the interludes took away from the tension of the rest of the story.
Still, I can’t deny that this was a novel that, for all it felt at times like it moved a little slowly, still kept me engaged enough to keep turning pages, wanting to know what happened next, or what new surprises lay in wait for the characters. The book didn’t need to be action-packed to be entertaining, or even to provide a sense of tension, and Pratt showed a good amount of creativity to string the readers along. This might not have been a book I would have gone out and bought sight unseen, but I’m certainly glad that I did take the time to read it, and I can say with certainty that it’s a book that at some point I will probably read again.
(Book received in exchange for an honest review.)
While the characters were not particularly deep as far as development goes, they were still realistically done, so I can’t complain too loudly about them. They were more than just archetypes, but there were times that they felt flat, as though their whole lives were about the things going on between the pages at that time. It kept the reader very centred on current events, however, so this isn’t entirely a bad thing. Still, as characters can really make or break a book, a little more development might not have gone amiss.
Though oddly, it was the characters of Ismael and Echo that were the most developed. Ismael I can see, because he’s a very major player in the plot, trying to reach the light of a better world by exploiting people he himself sends to their deaths. He’s a complex man who has lived for centuries, full of obsessions and quirks and a rich sense of what I can only describe as “completeness.” Echo, too, was one of the more fleshed-out characters, though she existed mostly as Ismael’s tool. She didn’t allow herself to remain a tool, however, and was a powerful opportunist. While I can’t say that I liked her as a person, she was quite an interesting power, and she had a bit of an ethical turnaround while still staying true to her nature.
For all Pratt’s demonstrated creativity in coming up with the details of the briarpatch and alternate realities and how they work, he did commit one of the major writer no-no’s by telling rather than showing. Characters sitting down and telling somebody their backstory, or taking a chapter to explain how they met so-and-so, got so frequent that I couldn’t help but roll my eyes a time or two. Once or twice might be excusable. But there were times where a few sentences could have done just as well as an entire chapter, and the interludes took away from the tension of the rest of the story.
Still, I can’t deny that this was a novel that, for all it felt at times like it moved a little slowly, still kept me engaged enough to keep turning pages, wanting to know what happened next, or what new surprises lay in wait for the characters. The book didn’t need to be action-packed to be entertaining, or even to provide a sense of tension, and Pratt showed a good amount of creativity to string the readers along. This might not have been a book I would have gone out and bought sight unseen, but I’m certainly glad that I did take the time to read it, and I can say with certainty that it’s a book that at some point I will probably read again.
(Book received in exchange for an honest review.)
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