Seven Wonders by Ben Mezrich

Seven WondersSeven Wonders by Ben Mezrich
My rating: 1 of 5 stars

Seven Wonders reads like a Monty Python sendup of Raiders of the Lost Ark. I would have laughed out loud as I read if it hadn’t apparently been trying to be a thriller instead of a farce.

The hero of the story, Jack Grady, is impossibly brave and lucky, surviving every cliched hazard from the Lost Ark movies: masses of spiders, snakes, collapsing walls, attacks by deadly Amazonian warriors, poison darts and spears. He can climb anything, swim through claustrophobically small tunnels in total darkness holding his breath for impossible distances. The attractive female biologist who decides to join him manages to keep up.

The book is full of grammar and logic errors. The publishers didn’t spend much on editors for this one. For example, at one point something moves so slowly that its movement can be measured only “in nanoseconds.” Hey, guys, if it’s moving slowly, you would measure it in weeks, years, or centuries. You would measure the distance it traveled in nanometers, perhaps. At another point the evil billionaire (more cliches) is observing a calf. The next paragraph it is described as a lamb. Then the next paragraph it is a calf again. Get your eyeballs in shape before reading this one. You’ll be rolling them a lot.

I usually don’t give reviews this low because when a book is this bad I normally stop reading early and move on, but I was having enough fun looking for the stupid errors and hackneyed writing, thinking about how I was going to review it that I managed to finish it. You’ve been warned. Read it at your own peril.

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