A review by torts
The Medusa Prophecy by Cindy Dees
2.0
SO BAD (still better than Dan Brown).
I know I shouldn't have expected anything else from this genre, and I have only myself to blame for actually reading it. But still. Here is a list of what irked me about the book:
1. It pretends that it's trying to counteract stereotypes about femininity. It does not. Okay, maybe it doesn't pretend too hard, and I can kind of respect it for the sake that it's an unabashed Romance Novel written by a woman who was actually in a similar scenario (involved in the Air Force or something...) so she knows what kind of stereotypes she's actually working against. That being said, she's promoting what's wrong with the perception of women. Mary Wollstonecraft should come back as a brain-eating zombie and eat this woman's brain, because she's probably not using it too much anyway.
2. The writing is...Dan Brown-esque. (But at least it doesn't pretend to be amazing literature.)
3. The native people are portrayed in a very offensive manner. Ethnocentrism much? (Seriously, do people still believe in social darwinism or something? Why is it okay to treat whole groups of people like "savages"?)
4. The bad guys are generic Middle Easterners. For no apparent reason. They don't even get to belong to specific countries. They're just dark and hairy terrorists who speak Arabic and are inexplicably nefarious.
5. I read this. All of it. And I can never get back the time that I wasted being annoyed (and enthralled by the sheer depths of wrong-ness in this type of "literature").
All that being said, it was kind of hilarious.
I know I shouldn't have expected anything else from this genre, and I have only myself to blame for actually reading it. But still. Here is a list of what irked me about the book:
1. It pretends that it's trying to counteract stereotypes about femininity. It does not. Okay, maybe it doesn't pretend too hard, and I can kind of respect it for the sake that it's an unabashed Romance Novel written by a woman who was actually in a similar scenario (involved in the Air Force or something...) so she knows what kind of stereotypes she's actually working against. That being said, she's promoting what's wrong with the perception of women. Mary Wollstonecraft should come back as a brain-eating zombie and eat this woman's brain, because she's probably not using it too much anyway.
2. The writing is...Dan Brown-esque. (But at least it doesn't pretend to be amazing literature.)
3. The native people are portrayed in a very offensive manner. Ethnocentrism much? (Seriously, do people still believe in social darwinism or something? Why is it okay to treat whole groups of people like "savages"?)
4. The bad guys are generic Middle Easterners. For no apparent reason. They don't even get to belong to specific countries. They're just dark and hairy terrorists who speak Arabic and are inexplicably nefarious.
5. I read this. All of it. And I can never get back the time that I wasted being annoyed (and enthralled by the sheer depths of wrong-ness in this type of "literature").
All that being said, it was kind of hilarious.