Run, by Blake Crouch

Run is quite a thriller.  It starts off fast and keeps moving throughout the book, just like the family in the book who are running for their lives.  I thoroughly enjoyed Run and it's one of only a handful of books that were literally hard to put down.  Crouch has a great sense of pacing--just when you don't think you can take any more stress and horrors for the family, Crouch lets up and give you a breather.  Just when things get comfortable and the plot starts to drag--just a little--Crouch ramps things up again.

Crouch's style is perfect for this novel.  It's told very close in to the father's and mother's perspectives and almost has a claustrophobic feel.  He also uses fragment sentences which adds to the off-balance feel to the novel and gives a sense in the reader of also being on the run.

Run is a perfect demonstration of Ayn Rand's rule of fiction:  make things as difficult as possible for your protagonists.  Crouch succeeds in this mission without straining plausibility, and in the process has created a very satisfying thriller.

The List, by J. A. Konrath

(Notes at 30%)

So far, I'm enjoying The List--it's funny and I like the premise that a group of famous people were cloned and are just finding out about it.  It gets to the heart of the nature vs. nurture debate and I like that the author has come down on the side of nurture, or at least against nature.

It's interesting that the first plot point--the protagonist finding out he's a clone of a Founding Father--comes at 15% which is earlier that normal (20-25%).  I thought perhaps there would be a bigger event around 25% which would be the real first plot point (FPP) but so far there hasn't been and I'm up to 30%.  The reason the FPP is usually at 25% is to give the reader a chance to identify with the protagonist during the set-up:  to see what his or her life was like before the big change, to identify needs or gaps, and to make us like the character.  In the case of Tom in The List, I'm not overly invested in him so far, perhaps because he didn't have enough set-up before getting into the action.

I'm looking forward to seeing where the book goes from here.

(Notes after finishing)

I enjoyed The List even though the science was suspect and the situations the protagonists were put in strained plausibility.  That's because I read this book to be entertained by pop fiction, not to change my life.  As pop fiction, it had what it needed:  heroic protagonists, interesting bad guys, an intriguing concept, suspense and action that kept the story moving forward, and a good amount of humor from the side-kick characters.

Back of Beyond, by C. J. Box

I really liked the first half of this book.  It was set up well with a cop trying to solve a murder which led him to track down a horse-back trip into Yellowstone that both the murderer and his son were on.  The third quarter set up lots of mysteries and odd behavior from the members on the trip; it turns out this was just too much to wrap up in a natural way.  In the last quarter, a lot of back story was brought in to explain all the odd behavior and it didn't flow naturally from what came before.  It's a good example of deus ex machina and for me it ruined what was a good book up to that point.  I enjoyed Box's previous Blue Heaven because it had all the elements from the first three-fourths of the book come together naturally in a satisfying resolution at the end.  Now I wonder if the success he had in Blue Heaven was more by accident than design.