The Lock Artist, by Steve Hamilton

This is one of the best books I've read this year.  It's worth breaking down into the six core competencies:

Character:  This is probably the strongest part because the protagonist is interesting and has a secret past.  I liked the character's honesty, especially when it came to the illegal and immoral things he did.

Concept:  What if a traumatized child who didn't talk got sucked into a life of crime?  Would he be able to escape and find a normal life?

Plot Structure:  This book had an unusual plot structure, with one story leading up to the protagonist's entrance into the life of crime, and the other starting from that point and moving forward.  The two stories alternated and the book ended when the two stories linked together.  This structure was interesting but it's not clear that it added anything to the story that a straightforward chronological telling wouldn't have had.

Scene Construction:  This part was well done with the author quickly getting into the interesting part of the scene and keeping the reader's attention.

Writing Voice:  The story is told first person; we get to hear a lot of his inner thoughts which makes it interesting and which makes us care about him.

Theme:  There was no overt theme, and I was okay with that.  The story was really a coming-of-age tale for a troubled boy, and that was enough because it was done well.

The Poacher's Son, by Paul Doiron

The Poacher's Son was good but not great.  It had good structure, characters and concept.  The writing style was well done and the scene construction was fine.  Perhaps what kept it from being great for me was the theme.  The book didn't add up to much except for the son realizing his father was a scum bag.  The main character made lots of poor choices in the book based on his belief that his father was a good man despite many bad traits.  His confidence in his father was misplaced in the end, but then all of his bad decisions didn't have any big repercussions which made the plot lose a lot of impact for me.

Overall, I liked this book and I'm glad I read it.  But as happens often when I read a book that doesn't quite make it to greatness, I like to try to figure out why.

Bait and Switch, by Larry Brooks

Bait and Switch is a book by my favorite writing blogger, Larry Brooks.  Unfortunately, I didn't like the book although it's hard for me to put my finger on exactly why.  It seems there were a lot of little things that didn't quite work and they all added up to a disappointing experience.  For example:

• The set-up got me prepared for the protagonist to seduce a billionaire's wife, but the middle of the book spent very little time on the actual seduction.  The title could also apply to what the author did to the reader.

• The main character seemed superficial at times and some of the excerpts at the beginnings of the chapters were cliched and distracting from the story.
• The ending twists and turns were not set up well enough and were confusing to try to follow.  I think the author tried to do too much.
• It was hard to root for the protagonist because he was being dishonest and we also didn't care enough about him or the stakes to care much what happened to him.

None of these things are fatal flaws, and none of them get to the main problem of why I didn't like the book.  Maybe it's that none of the characters seemed realistic.  The word superficial keeps coming back to me.  The author never got me into the book so that I felt like I was inside of the fictitious world along with the characters.  I always felt that I was observing characters that a writer dreamed up and who was working too hard to convince me they were interesting.

Up Country, by Nelson DeMille

Up Country started off and ended well, but the middle was tedious and boring.  The story is about a Vietnam veteran returning to the country twenty years after the war on a secret mission for the U.S. Government.  Unfortunately, the stakes of the mission aren't revealed fully until the last part of the book, so the middle section was just a boring tale of a middle-aged guy on vacation revisiting his old war sites.

Another problem I had with the book is that we could have gotten inside the protagonist's head more.  For instance, when he found out his traveling companion--a supposed business woman working in Vietnam--was actually a cold-blooded killer, we didn't learn what went through his mind right after the fact even though the book was in first person.  Instead, we heard his inner monologue wondering which road to take next on their journey.

Up Country is a good example of Larry Brook's dictum that A-list authors can get away with poor writing and structure while unknowns must write to a higher standard.

The Help, by Kathryn Stockett

I read this book mainly because Larry Brooks is doing a deconstruction of it.  So, before reading his deconstruction, I'll do my own according to Brooks' six core competencies.

Structure:  The first plot point, where Skeeter decides to write a book about the colored maids, was right were it was supposed to be at 25%.  But the next 62% of the book drifted, some of it increasing the stakes--which were not strongly set up in the first quarter of the book--but most of it detailing the lives of Skeeter, Minny and Aibileen without a clear indication of how it connected to Skeeter's writing of the book.  The lack of focus in this section made it tedious to get through.  Then, at 87%, the book was published and things picked up which made the last part of the book a pleasure to read.

Writing Voice:  The book is written in first person from the point of view of three different characters.  It works.  But it is also written in a mix of past and present tense which doesn't work and is a distraction.  The story is clearly told as something that happened in the past, so why use the present tense except as a gimmick?  (For a book where present tense was used well, see Calumet City.)  Finally, the use of bad grammar while writing from the point-of-view of Aibileen was distracting and made it difficult to read.  It was probably a mistake to start the novel this way and could explain why the book was rejected 45 times before being accepted.  The bad grammar was unnecessary and a distraction.

Character:  The characters of the two colored maids, Minny and Aibileen, were well done and interesting.  However, the main character, Skeeter, was not shown as having strong motivation.  The stakes for her were not well developed so her part was not as interesting.

Concept:  What if a book showing the point-of-view of the colored help was published at the height of the Civil Rights Movement?  This is a good concept, but it could have been executed better by having the plot focused more on the consequences of writing the book.  How about making Skeeter fall in love with the senator's son and force her to choose between publishing the book and marrying the man she loves?  Instead, her romance with Stuart was only loosely connected to the concept and did not increase the stakes.

Theme:  The theme seems to be that colored maids are people too.  Well, duh!  If this book actually were written in the sixties at the height of the Civil Rights Movement, it would indeed have been important.  But in 2011, when the President of the United States is black, this theme doesn't cut it.

Scene Construction:  The scenes were well done.  The first person narrative was effectively used to get us inside the head of the narrator and make the scene come alive.

Overall, I liked The Help, but mostly for the last part of the book where the consequences of the publication unfolded.  I think the best executed elements of the book were character and scene construction, especially when it came to Minny and Aibileen.  I think these elements are what people responded to and made it a best seller.  Larry Brooks has a tendency to take best selling books and assume that they have perfect structure since they are best sellers.  I think The Help is a good example of where the structure is merely adequate but where other elements are strong enough to make up for it.

The Ruins, by Scott Smith

I liked A Simple Plan so much, I was really looking forward to The Ruins.  Boy, was I disappointed.  If you want to read a book where people are as dumb as plants and plants are as smart as people, The Ruins is for you.  This book has a lot of problems: the premise is silly (man eating plants with no explanation), too many characters with no strong protagonist, and a meandering structure with no clear plot points.  But the biggest problem is that the characters are so stupid.  The plot is weak because the characters are not proactively trying to get out of their situation.  They just react to the plant, and in many cases stupidly.  Who wants to read a book about people who act stupid to the point where they can't even try to save their own lives?   At about three-quarters of the way through the book, I started rooting for the plant to win and it actually got better!

Surprisingly, the movie was quite a bit better.  In the movie, the characters were much more proactive and the structure was better with clear plot points.  I'm surprised that Scott Smith wrote both the book and the screenplay.  If he knew enough to have a strong structure and proactive characters for the screenplay, why didn't he apply those principles to the book?

The Naked Face, by Sidney Sheldon

The Naked Face was written in 1970 and it shows.  There's a lot of psychobabble which may have been chic in the '70s but is silly now.  Unfortunately, the plot wasn't very good and it was tough to get through.  I guess Sheldon was a better TV Show creator (I Dream of Jeannie, Hart to Hart) than an author.