Sandstorm
by James Rollins
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Book Summary Information
Author: James RollinsEdition: Mass Market Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2005-04-26
ISBN: 0060580674
Number of pages: 608
Publisher: Harper
Book Reviews of Sandstorm
Book Review: Not nearly as good as I expected
Summary: 2 Stars
I read & loved Map of Bones, Rollins most recent release, so I picked up this book thinking it would be just as good. I moved backwards to this predecessor because I had not heard of Rollins before. Mistake!
I cannot start a book & not finish it & I don't like to read more than one book at a time; personal quirks I live with. Usually I read a book a week, because I usually find good reads based on reviews, research & sales. There was nothing to suggest that I wouldn't like this. Reviews of the book were good, sales were good, & the story seemed enthralling. My formula did not work. This was a month long marathon of torture. I felt like I was back in high school or college reading a book that I hated but had to read to complete a report or take a test to pass the course.
What a disaster of a novel. The book is over 500 pages long for 1 very simple reason: this guy can drag out the description of a piece of dirt for at least a page. It would also appear that Rollins pulled out a thesaurus the day he started writing this book, picked out five to ten words that are not often used in conversation, & regurgitated those five to ten words over and over again. Why? I don't know.
The story and the facts supporting it are promising, intriguing. It involves anti-matter (yes, the same stuff in "Angels & Demons"), the lost city of Ubar (the queen of Sheba and the Garden of Eden), & the potential for world domination based on some long-buried secret. A good formula for a scientific & historical thriller. Right? Wrong!
To top it off, Rollins attempts to add a love story (you could call it a love triangle) to this train wreck of a novel, which only further bogs down the story.
Some of the characters (described in full as if they will be a major player) exist for no apparent reason other than to add a line of dialogue, and the dialogue is bad throughout. One character, who appears in the first chapter & is described with enough detail that you can assume he will be a key character, never returns. Why? It's a muddled mess.
The main characters are unemotional & unresponsive, almost lifeless, considering that they are facing life-and-death situations.
The dialogue is ridiculous: calm conversations about scientific realities & falsehoods in the midst of a gunfight taking place under the so-called sand-storm of the century; attempted witty banter between two characters that have not had an ounce of chemistry; run-on, endless dialogue about scientific facts without a pause or interruption.
I was thoroughly disappointed in this book & I won't be reading any of Rollins' earlier works. I may attempt the follow up to "Map of Bones", if one is released. Maybe that was the turning point for Rollins, the place where he found his writing niche. I'm not sure if I will, but I might.
I am sure that there are many people who truly enjoyed this novel, but I found it to be trite & cliche, a drudgery. I hope anyone who buys this book enjoys it, I just want to let you know that you may want to think twice before believing the great reviews.
For the sake of relativity, I will provide a list of some of my favorite books in this genre so you can decide whether or not my opinion matters to you: The Last Templar by Khoury, The Third Secret & The Romanov Prophecy by Berry, Obsessed by Dekker, Brethren by Young, Labyrinth by Mosse, and The First Horseman & The Genesis Code by Case
Enjoy!
Summary of Sandstorm
An inexplicable explosion rocks the antiquities collection of a London museum, setting off alarms in clandestine organizations around the world. And now the search for answers is leading Lady Kara Kensington; her friend Safia al-Maaz, the gallery's brilliant and beautiful curator; and their guide, the international adventurer Omaha Dunn, into a world they never dreamed existed: a lost city buried beneath the Arabian desert. But others are being drawn there as well, some with dark and sinister purposes. And the many perils of a death-defying trek deep into the savage heart of the Arabian Peninsula pale before the nightmare waiting to be unearthed at journey's end: an ageless and awesome power that could create a utopia . . . or destroy everything humankind has built over countless millennia.
There are terrifying mysteries hidden deep in the desert sands.
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