027 - Red Rabbit

I’ve recently gotten into the swing of reading Tom Clancy. This is the second one I’ve read/reviewed over the last few weeks. However, this one was big. Red Rabbit comes in at just over 600 pages. With a book that long it’s needless to mention that there are several subplots found throughout the book. Clancy does an excellent job crafting the story and building characters. His book is quite detailed and breaks down each and every situation into several pages worth of prose. With a writer as detailed as Clancy it is easy to see why this book ended up so large.

The only issue I take with Clancy is that in his writing often it takes me a while to really grasp the story. This book starts off extremely slow, and takes a while to build the many characters. Clancy introduces so many characters so fast, I found myself re-reading pages to figure out exactly who he’s talking about. However, to my understanding this task gets easier since many of Clancy’s books return to the same group of characters.

Red Rabbit was a great story and had a strong plot. The twist was somewhat predictable though and offered little extra to the story. Also, I wonder if perhaps Clancy spent a little too much time on the details rather than on the story itself. I found that this book was very easy to put down and self-discipline is the only way I finished it. I would classify the last 100 pages as a “page-turner” but wading through the first 500 might not be worth it.

018 - The Teeth of the Tiger

I own several Tom Clancy books, but have unfortunately never had the chance to read through any of them. I’ve heard plenty of great things about Clancy, mostly from men. And now after reading his book I know why. Clancy writes for men. In the same way that most war movies, spy sagas, and violent pictures are geared for men, Clancy designs his plots, characters, and twists to appeal to men.

For the most part, The Teeth of the Tiger was a great read. As stated earlier since it was written for men, and I am a man, I thoroughly enjoyed it. My only problem came near the end of the novel. As I approached the last 50 pages I began to wonder how the book was going to end. And then it did. It was interesting up to the end, but nothing to make the book memorable. No great obstacle to overcome. Just an ending.