Ripper CD: A Novel Audiobook CD – Audiobook, Unabridged Author: Visit Amazon's Isabel Allende Page | Language: English | ISBN:
0062311018 | Format: EPUB
Ripper CD: A Novel Audiobook CD – Audiobook, Unabridged Description
From Booklist
*Starred Review* In her last novel, Maya’s Notebook (2013), Allende illuminated a criminal underworld. Now she nimbly joins her detective novelist husband, William C. Gordon, in writing crime fiction. Given her signature combination of bewitching imagination and social gravitas, Allende creates a compassionate and gripping mystery stoked by the paradoxes of family and community and the consequences of abuse. Super-smart high-school senior Amanda Martín is obsessed with an Internet role-playing game, Ripper (as in Jack), and oversees a group comprising four other brilliant misfit teens from around the world as well as her grandfather, who raised her after her very young parents divorced. Amanda’s father, Bob, is a deputy chief of homicide in the San Francisco police department. Her mother, Indiana, is a healer too kind for her own good who is romantically entangled with a former navy SEAL and a wealthy dilettante. As Amanda and her cyber-brigade investigate a series of ritualistic murders no one else believes are connected, Allende richly portrays a range of intriguing characters, from Ayani, a famous Ethiopian model and women’s rights activist, to Attila, a heroic war dog. Sensitive to inequality, injustice, and psychological complexity and touching on everything from aromatherapy to illegal immigrants to PTSD, Allende’s tightly plotted tale of crimes obvious and masked is sharply perceptive, utterly charming, and intensely suspenseful.HIGH-DEMAND BACK STORY: Best-selling Allende’s leap into crime fiction will be energetically promoted with a national author tour and a publicity blitz directed at both her fans and mystery enthusiasts. --Donna Seaman
--This text refers to the
Hardcover
edition.
Review
'A literary banquet overflowing with morsels of Nancy Drew, mouthfuls of Agatha Christie, a sprinkle of Barbara Cartland and dashes of James Patterson and Tom Clancy ... [The]combination of detective story and romantic saga is likely to intrigue Allende fans ... What lingers is Allende's generosity with fictional detail, her warmth and humanity' Observer 'Idiosyncratic, unflinching, glaringly contemporary (it is about a bunch of online gamers who end up tracking a serial killer in San Francisco) and obviously much better written than it needs to be. Allende excels at exacting portraiture and barbed asides' Guardian 'As it gathers pace, the tale becomes gripping and delivers a clever final twist' Sunday Times '"Ripper" is full of wry humour. Brimming over with humanity it is very far from being a straightforward thriller ... All Allende's habitual concerns are on display: the interplay of character, the importance of family and the conflicting pulls of religion, spiritualism and alternative remedies ... Allende manages to pull it off as a terrific storyteller. She holds the reader's attention from start to finish and throws in a neat twist at the end' Daily Express, Five Stars 'Thoroughly charming book ... a lot of fun to read. Also, it features a teenage sleuth... who is pretty much irresistible ... Allende blithely dispenses with the more restrictive genre conventions to get to the fun parts ... A canvas so crowded with life that even death seems to melt into the background' New York Times 'Literary icon Isabel Allende mesmerizes with her first crime novel ... this race-against-the-clock thriller is pure magic' People Magazine
--This text refers to the
Paperback
edition.
See all Editorial Reviews
- Audio CD
- Publisher: HarperAudio; Unabridged edition (January 28, 2014)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0062311018
- ISBN-13: 978-0062311016
- Product Dimensions: 5.6 x 5.6 x 1.5 inches
- Shipping Weight: 9.9 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
Over the past few years, Isabel Allende has been trying to stretch her literary abilities by writing in genres outside of those that made her famous. She's dabbled in fantasy (Zorro), historical fiction (Ines of My Soul, Island Beneath The Sea), children's literature (City of Beasts), and even Young Adult (Maya's Notebook). It's admirable that Allende is tackling these styles at a point in her career when many authors at similar junctures would be coasting on their reputations. But, attempting doesn't guarantee succeeding. As is the case with several of her other forays into new territory, Allende proves with Ripper that the skill set which makes one a good novelist doesn't always work when applied to other genres.
Ripper is theoretically the story of a girl and her cohorts who, in the course of playing the game "Ripper", attempt to solve real murders: murders that eventually impact her immediate family. However, Allende establishes early in the book that she's not overly interested in the mystery (in fact, she has one of her characters disparage mysteries by commenting on how easy it is to write one). Instead, Allende is more interested in subjects that her long time readers will recognize: the power of family, the strength of women, the loutish nature of most men, and the role of the slightly supernatural in our lives. When Allende is playing in her usual sandbox of themes, Ripper holds together very well. She meticulously develops her characters, builds plausible scenes with those characters to highlight the themes, and even provides them with realistic dialogue (long a weakness of Allende's). But, so much energy is poured into the character study that the mystery becomes even more of an afterthought than Allende establishes early in the book.
This is the book. THE BOOK. The one about which I finally stand up and say NO MORE. I have been a fan of Allende's all the way back to the beginning. Eva Luna, House of the Spirits, Of Love and Shadows; these books all blew me away. Her lyrical prose, the magical realism style with which she exposes the corruption of unnamed South American countries and opened my eyes to a different world. Then, along came Daughter of Fortune, a novel set in the gold-rush era in California. I loathed that book and hoped for every character to die an terrible death just so the book would end already. I knew there was no way I'd pick up her next book, Portrait in Sepia, and make it out alive. I didn't read her work again until Maya's Notebook, though Ines of my Soul is on my bookshelf. Maya's Notebook was a semi-crime novel but it took a long way to get to the point. I only enjoyed it because it took me back to South America, a place where I feel Allende brings her best self.
But Ripper? Oh, no, no, NO! I tried, I really did. I read over 200 pages before I finally screamed and threw the book. It is described as "an atmospheric, fast-paced mystery involving a brilliant teenage sleuth who must unmask a serial killer in San Francisco." Oh, really now? Fast-paced? Like a snail maybe. How about as fast as an old man walking up Everest using only a cane? Yeah, about that fast. And the teenage sleuth Amanda? She and her forays into an online game called Ripper which she uses to try and solve a series of crimes happening in San Fransisco are brief interludes between the long, long descriptions and back story of her mother, Indiana, and her many lovers and friends. Of course one them is the killer. I hope it isn't the really obvious one. But I skipped to the end and it is! Shocker.
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