Negative Positive
Title: Not much of a prison break novel
Review: The cover copy on this book bills it as prison break story but it's mostly about how horrible it is to be trapped in a Soviet Gulag. An American escape artist is blackmailed by the CIA into going to the USSR disguised as a Russian dissident. He is supposed to get himself arrested and then break out of Lubyanka prison with a Russian scientist who knows some top secret information. Along the way he falls in love with the woman pretending to be his sister and then gets himself sent to a Siberian work camp (he doesn't meet Ivan Denisovitch, though).The whole book is very dreary and slow going. The prison escape highlighted on the back of the book doesn't happed for a long time and then is mostly a matter of knocking out a guard. The author does seem to know a lot about the Soviet Union, though.
Is the review positive or negative? 