Tabitha King

This novel gets two stars because, from a sheer technical standpoint, Tabitha King can write.

Unfortunately, no matter how well things are described, no matter the actual quality of the writing, it doesn't make up for a meandering, slow story that, for pages and pages and pages, simply goes nowhere. And from a plotting and pacing standpoint, King made some very odd choices.

Why not have someone wake up in the White House, and slowly, to their horror, realize they're not in the real one, but a small-scaled model? Then the story can go back and dig into how they got there. Instant mystery, instant intrigue.

Instead, King goes for a good opening fraction of the book before any of this stuff comes up. And when it does, I'm sorry, but I simply could not get past the absolute unbelievability of this device that shrinks things down. I mean, for all intents and purposes, it's a damn camera. But it knows exactly what you want shrunk and it shrinks only that? And it just happens to shrink things to the specific size of an already-built scale model of the White House? Like, bang on?

And King seemed to not be able to decide on the exact size of her shrunken characters. Could they fit into a match box? Or were they inches tall? It seemed rather fluid through the novel.

But overall, the greatest sin of this novel? Aside from a fun little nod to hubby's The Shining, this book was quite boring. Which is why it took me damn near two weeks to read a 329-page novel, the last third of that in one sitting today just to clear it from my task list. Because, by this point, it was a task.… (more)