Ravens

A very quick read. I did enjoy reading it but to be honest the storyline was sometimes a bit ridiculous.
The family that was "captured"had enough chances to get away. Someone suggested they were suffering from Stockholm syndrome but I do not think you can get attached to your captures so soon, in a week or even shorter? What I also thought was ridiculous was it is a small town and then suddenly people starting to think Shaw is Jesus. And that is all normal. He starts a kind of a church (all in a week's time) lol and the police and the citizens all find that normal.
I will give it 3 stars because it did kept me interested. ( )

I couldn't wait to find out how these two were going to scheme their way into the family and then confiscate half the winnings. The plan ended up being interesting, but the execution turned out to not be fully developed. It became implausible, therefore a bit silly to me. I did enjoy a couple of the characters - they actually added some stability to the plot. (2.75/5)

Originally posted on: Thoughts of Joy ( )

http://alliscballread.blogspot.ca/2012/02/book-8-ravens.html ( )

Interesting "what if" that drives the story. Green doesn't get too deep into the characters, but there is no way he can when he's dancing back and forth between at least five PoVs. It works, though. The reader gets a 360 degree view of Brunswick, GA as well as the unsuspecting family that hits it big.

What Ravens lacks in character development and empathy for its ilk, it makes up for in pacing and action. One of the best things about the book is that it takes place over a few days and it really feels that way while readingf--nothing feels rushed or too drawn out for the time frame to cause disbelief. ( )

Stopping for gas in a small town in Georgia, two guys in the middle of a road trip hear about a local family having just won a staggeringly large lotto jackpot and hatch a plan to extort a share of the cash out of them by threatening their loved ones. It's good premise for a thriller, and the writing is decent, in a vaguely literary sort of way. But this book really didn't work for me, mainly because the characters didn't work for me. The victim family and their friends are mostly cliched, unlikeable, and flat, except maybe for the grandmother, who has a sort of forced, artificial quirkiness that's just as bad. Meanwhile, the criminals are stupid enough that you have to wonder how they manage to get very far with this plan at all, and their supposed psychological motivations are mushy and unconvincing. I think they're all meant to be sort of darkly humorous, but on the whole I just found them irritating. Which meant that I didn't particularly care what might happen to any of them. Which in turn meant that I never felt much in the way of suspense. And, oh, yeah, there's also a bizarre religious motif that crops up throughout the novel, but if there's any actual point to that I have no idea what it is. ( )