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A review by brettt
Michelangelo's Notebook by Paul Christopher
1.0
It's 2005. A top-selling 2003 airport thriller has been in production and will hit theaters next year. So other publishers know exactly what they have to do: Get as many knockoffs of The DaVinci Code into print while people are still interested in secrets contained in centuries-old artwork and manuscripts and shadowy Vatican conspiracies.
So thriller author Christopher Hyde adds the pen name Paul Christopher to his work and offers up Michlangelo's Notebook, a novel which is almost entirely derivative and which is still not any good when it isn't.
Graduate art history student Finola "Finn" Ryan has found something incredible tucked into a back drawer of the works she is cataloging at the museum where she interns. An old, tattered page that may be from the famed lost anatomical sketchbook of Michelangelo himself. But her boss rejects her notion and fires her; then a mysterious assailant attacks her later that evening. Now alone and on the run, Finn calls on an old friend of her late father's, a rare book dealer named Michael Valentine. But Valentine has a past of a different sort, and he will call on those skills to help Finn unravel the conspiracy that endangers her.
Notebook mixes art theft, Vatican conspiracies, puzzle-solving and breathless flight from evil assassins in a tested formula. And Hyde has a much better hand at the keyboard than Brown. His dialogue rings more real, his sentences don't limp and he inserts touches such as an art aficionado noticing a room's paintings and decor before anything else. He switches narrative tone for different viewpoint settings and characters in a way that helps distinguish them.
All that being said, though, Notebook is just about as bad as a knockoff of an already lousy book could be. The flashback scenes take up far more space than they merit. The ending is rushed, with a fairly major plotline ending instead of really being resolved. The whole thing reads like someone bet Hyde he couldn't write a DaVinci Code-like thriller in less than a week and he brought this manuscript back as proof he could. Too many narrative threads, incomplete resolutions, specious "history" fueling the core conspiracy... Notebook hits all the checkpoints. And it adds in a Manic Pixie Dream Girl heroine who speaks and acts exactly the way a middle-aged author would imagine a twenty-something female who begins a romance with a middle-aged book dealer would act.
Hyde would continue the Finn Ryan series and in 2009 offer a second series from the pen of "Paul Christopher." Without having read them, I would be fairly certain they were better than Michelangelo's Notebook. Because it would take a lot of work to make them worse, and nothing about Notebook indicates that this is a series in which Hyde wants to invest that much work.
Original available here.
So thriller author Christopher Hyde adds the pen name Paul Christopher to his work and offers up Michlangelo's Notebook, a novel which is almost entirely derivative and which is still not any good when it isn't.
Graduate art history student Finola "Finn" Ryan has found something incredible tucked into a back drawer of the works she is cataloging at the museum where she interns. An old, tattered page that may be from the famed lost anatomical sketchbook of Michelangelo himself. But her boss rejects her notion and fires her; then a mysterious assailant attacks her later that evening. Now alone and on the run, Finn calls on an old friend of her late father's, a rare book dealer named Michael Valentine. But Valentine has a past of a different sort, and he will call on those skills to help Finn unravel the conspiracy that endangers her.
Notebook mixes art theft, Vatican conspiracies, puzzle-solving and breathless flight from evil assassins in a tested formula. And Hyde has a much better hand at the keyboard than Brown. His dialogue rings more real, his sentences don't limp and he inserts touches such as an art aficionado noticing a room's paintings and decor before anything else. He switches narrative tone for different viewpoint settings and characters in a way that helps distinguish them.
All that being said, though, Notebook is just about as bad as a knockoff of an already lousy book could be. The flashback scenes take up far more space than they merit. The ending is rushed, with a fairly major plotline ending instead of really being resolved. The whole thing reads like someone bet Hyde he couldn't write a DaVinci Code-like thriller in less than a week and he brought this manuscript back as proof he could. Too many narrative threads, incomplete resolutions, specious "history" fueling the core conspiracy... Notebook hits all the checkpoints. And it adds in a Manic Pixie Dream Girl heroine who speaks and acts exactly the way a middle-aged author would imagine a twenty-something female who begins a romance with a middle-aged book dealer would act.
Hyde would continue the Finn Ryan series and in 2009 offer a second series from the pen of "Paul Christopher." Without having read them, I would be fairly certain they were better than Michelangelo's Notebook. Because it would take a lot of work to make them worse, and nothing about Notebook indicates that this is a series in which Hyde wants to invest that much work.
Original available here.