1632 by Eric Flint (review)

Title: 1632
Author: Eric Flint
Illustrator: N/A
Kindle Locations: 9,611
Genre: Fiction
Dewey Decimal:
ISBN: 0-671-57849-9
Kindle Cost: Free

1632 is a blast from the past. Having seen this book and its sequels on the store shelves for years, I've always passed it by because it looked very old-school and campy.

And it was. To a point. You see, Flint takes a different road than most writers. He doesn't try to layer on the intrigue and plot twists and detail. Instead he keeps his story neat and simple and moves it along nicely. So instead of describing a lot of minute details about how people survived the sudden change, he skips ahead a few months.

A lot of readers may not like that, I found it refreshing. I needed to take a break from all the details in other stories I was reading. Stories that were starting to sound like Robinson Crusoe with their detail.

While Flint's approach to keeping things simple was nice, I didn't care for his transitions between scenes. Maybe it was poor formatting from the e-book conversion, but the story jumped from plot line to plot line or character to character without warning. In fact, several times I'd go back and re-read two paragraphs because I didn't catch the change that came between them.

Overall, Flint does a good job. His style is a little rough and doesn't have the polish of other big names in the genre, but he still entertains. An added bonus is this story was free. Hard to turn down a deal like that and hard to put down once you start.