Douglas Lain

Ugh, this may be the worst Winnie the Pooh book I've read yet. It's a literary novel that travels in magical realism territory, meaning it is full of hallucinations and godawful dream sequences.

Christopher Robin Milne, the son of A. A. Milne, is having a midlife crisis of sorts, and travels to France in 1968 to meet a French college student who sent him a mysterious letter. The student wants to subvert Milne's heritage and make him a figurehead of the May 1968 civil unrest, a major turning point on the road to Charles de Gaulle's resignation the next year. The student also wants to get back together with his on-and-off girlfriend, who is currently trying to live her life as if she were the lead character of Bonjour Tristesse, a 1954 novel by Françoise Sagan.

I am unfamiliar with Sagan's novel, the May 68 events and most of the real people sprinkled throughout Lain's novel, so a lot of that is lost on me. But I am familiar with the Milne and Pooh side of things, and that side was pure crap, so I don't doubt the French half is also.

I think this is the type of novel that would be quite enjoyed by the academics and critics satirized in The Pooh Perplex.

(My Pooh Project: I love Winnie the Pooh, and so does my wife. Having a daughter gave us a chance to indoctrinate her into the cult by buying and reading her every Pooh book we came across. How many is that? I’m going to count them this year by reading and reviewing one every day and seeing which month I finally run out. Track my progress here:
https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/23954351-rod-brown?ref=nav_mybooks&she... )… (más)

Okay, I'm officially abandoning this one (though still marking it as "read" since I had to put up with it for so long).

I had high hopes for the story, but it just didn't grab me. The idea of being invaded by underwhelming aliens with 70s style is possibly a good one, and it might have been presented in an interesting way. It just didn't happen in this book. It's too slow to get to the point, and it's deliberately confusing in a way that doesn't really add to the story at all. Also, I have simply no motivation to care about the whiney, self-absorbed protagonist. In short, there's not much I can say about this book that I liked.

I wish I could've liked it. I wanted to like it. But I didn't.… (más)

Read all my reviews on http://urlphantomhive.booklikes.com

To start with the good: It is unlike any other alien invasion books I've ever come across. It provides an answer to the question which bother us all: what if the discovery of aliens showed that they were nothing but completely underwhelming, with their jumpsuits and new age-y religion.

The bad: I had a constant feeling when I was reading this that it was trying to convey something to me, but I couldn't find out what. It is partly a criticism on society I suppose, but I didn't think it was a particular strong one.

The ugly: I was bored. A lot. Part of the book is really confusing, and while I think that's intentional, it made that I could never get invested in the story. Basically, I was counting the percentages I still had to read on my Kindle.

All in all, an interesting concept, but its execution didn't work for me.

Thanks to the publisher and Edelweiss for providing me with a free copy of this book in exchange for an honest review!… (más)