Title: Passable but uninspiring
Review: I never stopped reading it because it was terrible, but I wouldn't recommend it to anyone either. To be fair, it has a couple great plot twists, but all in all 5 pages of surprise aren't worth 500 pages of filler. It's a fence sitter book, that is, it sits on the fence between satire and serious and doesn't manage to do either well. The story is filled with "funny" place and character names (like Sultan Tummyfat and the harbours of Gulp and Guzzle) that make the writing whimsical without any kind of humour. In between this "hilarity" the book preaches a half baked stance of eugenics and environmentalism without any rational justification or explanation. Any kind of credibility Tepper gains with the latter is instantly torn down by the former. She has some interesting things to say about animal rights, but ultimately her Nazi-esque ideas about solving human over-population prevent me from taking her at all seriously.
Is this product review negative?