As a public service, I thought it would be helpful to cobble together all the negative criticism ever written about my debut novel A Time and a Place (at least all that I could find online) and publish it as one single blisteringly harsh review. Kind of like ripping the Bandaid (TM) off all at once.
A “frankenreview“, if you will.
Every line is pretty much a direct quote from the original source review, though I’ve jumbled it all up so that my frankenreview follows a kind of twisted logic. I altered some punctuation and the occasional pronoun/noun in the interest of syntax.
I think the result is a fairly kick-ass review, though admittedly not one likely to help me sell more books.
To see more reviews of A Time and a Place (both positive and negative), or to add your own, check out its Goodread’s page.
I must confess that I am fairly conflicted about Joe Mahoney’s ‘A Time and a Place’. More than once I picked this up to read and simply could not do it. I didn’t like this one, and couldn’t get past the third chapter. It’s too much like too many other books and it is also very slow. Liked it but didn’t luv it, BUT NOT saying it was bad, just not totally my type or maybe the mood, but seemed as if in places it dragged a bit. Parts of the novel seemed a little rushed, and there’s questions left unanswered.
The novel is probably too strange for people who normally don’t care for science fiction. To list some points of criticism, which are meant to be constructive, I think that the author was a bit too ambitious. A Time and a Place is a complex story and an ambitious novel, but I found that the execution wasn’t quite up to the premise. Normally, this would take 3 books or more to cover. Compressing it into one book meant that it comes across rushed, and there is not enough time for sufficient character development, or exploration of the themes.
Mahoney clearly has a peculiar sense of humour and (for me) a protagonist who really needed a good smack upside the head! He saddles (his) world with one of the least likeable protagonists I’ve read around in some time. I would have given (the book) a higher rating if it wasn’t for the characters. The main character can be annoyingly obtuse at times. I feel like most of them besides Wildebear aren’t fleshed out and are just there for plot convenience. Even Wildebear, despite being close to 40 years old, was childish most times and I didn’t like the book as much because of him. Barnabus J. Wildebear is a strange character, at times willfully ignorant of the world around him, ill suited to the task at hand, yet still trying to act as if his opinions about almost any of the circumstances he is caught up in are remotely valid. Unfortunately, Barnabus seems pulled through the events of the story by external forces and lacks the level of agency I like to see in a protagonist. Much of the time he comes across as bewildered.
The second half of the book got a bit muddled for me. I felt I needed a diagram to keep track of it all. There were few female characters. Besides Swipe, there’s Barnabus’s dead sister, and then the scientist Sarah (who is always described by her awesome looks first and second and her mental abilities third). Perhaps we can count Iugurtha as a female character, but she’s really a mix of all the people she’s absorbed over the years. It would have been nice to have a bit more from the ladies.
The ending rallies a bit, despite occasional segments that distract or feel a little overdone. I was still confused about Iugurtha who I think becomes known as Jacques… but then there’s also Jack, right? These seem to be all the same ‘demon’ (or alien) at different points in time. But I’m not sure, which is what bothered me. I want to be sure about such things by the end of a book. Speaking of that ending, it gets rather sentimental and strives for deep thoughts. I found it a little sappy. I wanted a more definitive ending, perhaps following a rousing action scene.
A Time and a Place strikes me as quintessentially Canadian – oddly polite and mannered and stubbornly domestic, even while an absurd parade of characters, circumstances and magical beings marches through the book. So why didn’t it click with me? Because that’s just the way it goes with humour. If Mahoney had maintained the dry humor of Wildebear throughout the whole story he likely could have pulled off a Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy vibe. But the humor gets lost at times and the protagonist’s point of view comes across more naive than anything else through the middle chunk of the book.
Joe Mahoney has narrated his own story. He does a decent job but needs a little polishing all around. There were a few mouth noises here and there. The pacing was just a touch slow. The female voices were pretty good though sometimes they could have used a little more femininity.
culled from Various sources such as Goodreads, Librarything, and Amazon
