http://www.fnordinc.com/2009/11-14/au...

still sick.. bear with me if my grammar and such sucks today…

on a recent trip to california for a wedding, jenn and i decided to spend the whole trip not talking to each other. no no no, it wasnt because of bad stuff, it was because audiobook goodness was going to make the long car drive easier.

12+ hours of audio, the unabridged audiobook of Dean Koontz “Lightning”.

Lightning is the story of a woman, Shane, who’s destiny is altered repeatedly by a stranger. at key points of her life a pale stranger, Stefan, arrives and aids her. his only goal is to make sure she lives. through muggings, abuse, and accidents, he assists her. what he doesnt know is that his help will bring men with machine guns her way.

- Lightning details how each of these events is mysteriously associated with erratic weather patterns.

- it details how destiny does not like to be led, and will attempt to revert back to its original shape.

Turned out to be a pretty decent book.

ultimately, the plot line is fairly easy to predict. there were points that jenn and i were both frustrated waiting hours for the obvious to occur. there even a few curve balls thrown in that misled rather well. its worth while to either listen to it or read it. Lightning was enjoyable, predictable, but enjoyable.

__

i have only two main complaints.

1) koontz has one repeating heavy handed phrase which gets used about 400 times in the last 10 chapters. by the end, if i heard it again, i would have smashed the car window, slit my throat on the glass, then died peacefully as i bled out driving down Interstate 5.

2) the audiobook reader, Christopher Lane, cant do little girls or little boy voices worth a damn. all little girl (with the exception of the main character) sounded utterly and undeniably like flamboyant gay males. the you male voices came out sounding like girls. this kind of visually tainted some scenes from the book.

__

side note: why is there a man on the front cover instead of Shane, the female protagonist?

- FNORDinc.com ( )

Laura has a guardian angel who throughout her life helps her through trials & saves her from disaster. Turns out her "angel" is actually a time traveler from 1944 Berlin, Germany. She is an author & writes several books. Her "angel" falls in love with her & tries to save her & her son, Chris, from SS/KGB agents trying to kill them. ( )

This book is hard to review without giving away the plot twists; I can't even explain what the book is actually about without ruining it. I love this book. I have read it multiple times. For anyone who enjoys romance (without fluff,) and action, I recommend it. The heroine in the story is wonderfully strong. No fifties Lois Lane here. The hero is fantastic. ( )

This book is hard to review without giving away the plot twists; I can't even explain what the book is actually about without ruining it. I love this book. I have read it multiple times. For anyone who enjoys romance (without fluff,) and action, I recommend it. The heroine in the story is wonderfully strong. No fifties Lois Lane here. The hero is fantastic. ( )

Lightning was recommended to me by a friend who said I would love it--it's a great piece of science fiction and suspense that was supposed to keep me enthralled.

Unfortunately, Lightning fell far short of that mark. I found it neither suspenseful nor particularly engaging, drawing as it did on so many cliches and predictable elements. The first part of the book is by far the better half: it introduced a somewhat interesting phenomenon, and while the characters and situations were not anything particularly inspired, they sufficed to keep the plot moving and me reading. The premise was interesting enough to overwrite the workmanlike prose and people.

However, I felt like the second half of the book was a letdown even from the popular-fiction standards the first half seemed to meet. After the plot 'twist' that explained the stranger's appearance at important moments of the protagonist's life, the book went sharply downhill. The explanation just didn't seem to live up to what preceded it, and after that, the book turned into one long, drawn-out chase sequence that was neither suspenseful nor interesting: I had to slog through the last quarter or so, instead of being the easy read of the earlier parts.

Final thoughts: nothing new or novel, though a passable premise is let down by the ending. My first experience with Koontz, and based on it, I won't be picking up any more of his books. That said, it would probably make decent beach reading and it certainly didn't make me want to gouge my eyes out, like many other popular writers do. ( )