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A review by thebeardedpoet
One Fearful Yellow Eye by John D. MacDonald
4.0
If you love a loquacious narrator, one who loves to wax philosophical about human nature, especially human folly, one who never misses an opportunity to offer a tangent of observation or thought (especially about whether to sex or not to sex), Travis McGee is for you, as is One Fearful Yellow Eye! Travis McGee is one interesting package: beach bum, anachronism, amateur sex therapist, amateur philosopher, automotive restoration hobbyist, art connoisseur, food connoisseur, and off-the-books salvage professional. It is McGee's voice that makes this series of books.
This particular story is exciting and moves along well, but the nature of McGee requires detours and soliloquies which take the pace down a notch at times. Also when the evil caper behind all the problems is revealed, it is a doozy--maybe just a little too bonkers for plausibility, but by that point the peril and resolution has carried you to an endpoint. Just don't sit there and think about it too much after the last couple pages.
It is all worth it for the prose which sings like poetry at times. Someone could use this book do a PhD on sentence length variation. Definitely one of the most poetic and rhetorically vigorous works of fiction I've ever read.
This particular story is exciting and moves along well, but the nature of McGee requires detours and soliloquies which take the pace down a notch at times. Also when the evil caper behind all the problems is revealed, it is a doozy--maybe just a little too bonkers for plausibility, but by that point the peril and resolution has carried you to an endpoint. Just don't sit there and think about it too much after the last couple pages.
It is all worth it for the prose which sings like poetry at times. Someone could use this book do a PhD on sentence length variation. Definitely one of the most poetic and rhetorically vigorous works of fiction I've ever read.