Review: Alex Cross's Trial

[gehayi]

Title: Alex Cross's Trial by James Patterson
Pages: 380 pages
Rating: Whatever the lowest rating that this group gives is. I'm not sure if it's 0 or 1.
Genre: Courtroom drama/historical novel

Comments

[ravenclaw_eric]

The modern version of the Klan was not founded till 1915, in Georgia, and wasn't any kind of a really big deal until after World War I. The Reconstruction Klan was dissolved after ca. 1877...formally, it had been disbanded rather earlier, but the "leadership" did not have too much control over individual Dens.

[gehayi]

Oh, yeah. That's mentioned repeatedly--that the Klan is illegal and has been officially dissolved. But it's still around, for the purposes of this book, ANYWAY.

I don't know if that's plausible or not, so I didn't address it. So much else was wrong.

[lazy_neutrino]

So much here, but the most shocking thing is that 1978. Unbelievable.

[gehayi]

Oh yeah. I was expecting the date to be considerably before that--the 1930s or 1940s, maybe. But 1978?!

[cygna_hime]

That is just...full of so much fail, I have no words. None. Oh, wait, found them: WHAT, THE, and FUCK.

I knew enough to hate books like this when I was in elementary school. It makes the characters look so overwhelmingly stupid and like they were raised by wolves (only not in the cool way) when they don't know things about their own culture that they shouldn't even have to think about. SO STUPID. And this book compounds that by making the lawyer not have the faintest idea about law. Sweet merciful deities, WHY?!!

*sobs bitterly into apron*

[gehayi]

Oh, I just remembered something! The sheriff tells another cop to read the surviving Raiders their rights.

The concept of the Miranda rights didn't come into existence until the Supreme Court decision in the case of Miranda v. Arizona (1966). AND the Miranda warning was highly controversial; a lot of cops felt that telling a suspect his or her rights was a bad idea. If the nation's cops hadn't been required by law to Mirandize suspects, most would have refrained from doing so.

So even if Mirandizing suspects weren't horribly anachronistic, it would have been OOC for a sheriff who thought nothing of lynching people.

Where is Captain Darwin? We need him!

[cygna_hime]

ARGH. Seriously, I've never done any actual *research* on the period, and I know better than this! How hard can it be to Google a couple terms? ARGH again.

Captain Darwin would make the world a better place.

[gehayi]

I didn't throw it across the room (though I wished I could!) because it was a library book and if I broke the spine I would probably have to pay for it.

But this doesn't sound problematic when you've got a close eye for detail, this sounds insultingly, stupidly anachronistic in ways that belittle and/or ignore entirely the problems people faced in the real world. And all the while it sets up yet another white messiah and ignores things like actions having consequences.

I know. It's amazingly wrong. And, sadly, most people think that it's illegal to publish anything vaguely historically inaccurate, so they will believe this. At a time when Rand Paul campaigning to repeal parts of the Civil Rights Act as unnecessary, if you please. I consider this book to be criminally irresponsible.

Don't look it up on Amazon. You'll be horrified by how many five-star ratings this piece of shit has received.

[smurasaki]

Awesome. James Patterson is a male Fern Michaels with added race fail and historical fail (though possibly better writing, unless writing fail seemed too minor to mention with the rest of the steaming pile of fail). Why are so many popular authors hideously bad? Is being terrible necessary for publication? Is there really a blind octopus picking manuscripts?

[gehayi]

I have no idea why so many popular authors are hideously bad. But don't blame the editors. A lot of popular fanfic writers suck too.

Being popular does not require being sucktastic. I cling to that notion.

Also, I had to look up Fern Michaels. (To be fair, The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants series didn't exist when I was a teenager, so I've never read her.) I thought you were referring to Fern Gravel, a ten-year-old poet of Iowa...who turned out to be a literary hoax by James Norman Hall who wrote the "Mutiny on the Bounty" trilogy. It struck me that Patterson might have been trying to have his cake and eat it too by putting his name on the cover but saying that this was REALLY written by Alex Cross.

[leaper182]

Traveling Pants was written by Brashares. Fern Michaels is responsible for romance novels, for the most part.

[gehayi]

Oh. Sorry. I guess I got mixed up because Fern Michaels writes a series called Sisterhood.