M

I TRIED to like this book, and gave 3 starts to emphasize that because if nothing else, I got through it fairly quickly and therefore had the attention span to do so. I was rooting for this book at first, but it just fell into the same old love triangles when the basic premise could have been expanded in much better ways. To clarify, I do enjoy romance novels, but I saw this book as a basic attempt to twist the same sappy idea into a sci-fi form.

I feel sort of bad rating this but I don't think guilt should keep me from being honest...the dead can't be free from criticism. This book felt like a long rant, like a big scribble. At the same time, it felt too clean.

It felt like a lot of the book was little conversations that didn't drive the plot and barely revealed anything about the characters. Every person said things typical to their “character” and Craig rambled on and everyone thought what he was saying was great. In regards to it being clean, it was far too simple of a story. It's strange that an author who wrote this after his own dark and personal experience with depression wrote such a happy near-perfect ending. While Craig says at the end that his depression isn't cured, everything in his life magically fell into place and every problem was magically solved. All his sources of stress were fixed! It was so far from reality.

This novel was written in the spirit of hope. I'm very optimistic, so I can get it, but also I have a more realist perspective that prevented me from enjoying this.

While the content hit a lot of interesting points, I could not get behind the structure of the series. Framing the discussion as a conversation made it feel disorganized. Also, i'm not sure if some details have aged well- thinking of “the Indians and their primitive ways” and the psychoanalysing. I am intrigued to read more of Campbell but it isnt free from critique for me.