Hey Gang, we were reading this one amongst some of us and I found it to be particularly annoying. I'll try to sum up my feelings. To be fair, I only read 67% of the story before giving up. At that point I was almost invested, and if I hadn't been reading it for the purposes of discussion I probably would have dropped it much sooner, around 10-15%.
A big problem I have with the text is that it's written in present tense. For a narrative, this really doesn't work. Especially for longer narratives. A short story, sure, but not a novel. The problem is that it gives everything a very immediate sense, an urgency. After a few hundred pages, it becomes tedious. A lot of the story isn't urgent either, it can be slow. In the beginning I had trouble following the cast of characters as there are quite a few, and they are just going about their lives doing their everyday stuff. Granted: One is an astronaut, another a brilliant scientist floating around the Pacific in her 'MyBoat', a very cool female President of the USA and her right hand man, another guy who is hunting for daughter's killer, a budding journalist, a famous actress and a typical american-bro esque college student and his ultra-liberal global-conscious girlfriend. The american bro also has a brother who works for NOAA and is in charge of figuring out the real deal.
That brings me to my second big complaint, there are too many characters, and no one protagonist. Each of them has their own story, their own subplot, and the over-arching plot is how the storm(s) affect each of them and how they deal with it. I'm also a little miffed that the antagonist is a super-hurricane(s). I mean, using a natural phenomenon or a situation as an antagonist does work. I really liked the movie The Day after Tomorrow, and Titanic is a great situational antagonist. What really is killing it for me is the lack of attachment to the characters.
I also think that's a byproduct of having too many, but I could be wrong (LoTR for example).
The third thing that erks me is all the sex. It's also weird sex in a lot of ways, especially when they get into the XV (like virtual reality) torture-porn. I understand why it works thematically, but it's distracting. It felt like he was trying too hard to write an 'adult' novel and needed to address sex because his characters have it, a lot. I thought it could have been done in a more tasteful manner. Maybe he's just a horn-ball, idk.
I did like the science though. It was obvious he did his research, and his scenario is plausible. The descriptions of the behavior of the weather were pretty awesome, I had no problem visualizing it. But when people die and numbers and places are used along with throw-away characters the audience will have difficulty forming an attachment to anyone in the text. Without empathy, without feeling like we're going through what they are and care about what happens to them - there's really no point. That is my fourth and final complaint.
