Rating: 
Summary: Bad, bad, bad
Review: I loved THe Eye of the Needle, Pillars of the Earth but this book is really bad.Most of the one or two star reviews I read have said it all, poor plot,poor writing,style of prose much worse than earlier thrillers of his. Really, don,t waste your money.
My wife had the flu and enjoys being read to so I tried this book on her and she asked if I could give it minus one stars.
Boring chapters on boring lives of Danes in early part of war,I only finished it because I paid for it.Even ending was predictable and didn,t come soon enough.Look elsewhere unless you enjoy badly written books or are a masochist.
Even the major premise of the book is flawed, Only British Air FOrce stands between Hitler and world domination.PLEEZ give me one large break. Losses of British bombers on air raids over Germany are staggeringly high, up to 50percent. Maybe the evil Kruauts are up to something.Maybe they have new radar on a remote Danish island and must be stopped at all costs.Oh, be still my beating heart, the suspense is killing me.As one other reviewer said, time to cross Follett off the list.
Rating: 
Summary: Classic Follett
Review: All of Euroope has fallen to the Nazi Jackboots, and England stands alone, bracing the for the inevitable. The Nazis have developed a secret weapon tha pinpoints their bombers and vectors fighter aircraft on thier flight paths. Unless something changes soon, the RAF will cease to be a viable military force.Against this backdrop, Ken Follett takes us to occupied Denmark and fledgling resistance movement called the Nightwatchmen. Their movements are tracked by the Gestapo and their willing accomplices in the National Police. But Denmark is also the site of one of Germany's new RADAR sites and the knowledge a Danish schoolboy is vital to England's war effort. Besides being a great story, Follett goes back to where he started. The characters are rich, and I immediately took a dislike to Peter Flemming (one of Follett's best villians). You find yourself cheering and crying as a desperate flight to freedom in Hornet Moth bi-plane crosses the North Sea. A must read!
Rating: 
Summary: Everybody can be a pilot?
Review: If you read this book like a thriller you will be disappointed, some parts are thrilling but not even half of the book, this is not a bad story but is not the best of Follett, nevertheless is a book that will get you a good time. This book is a story of the WWII but you will not know to much about that war in this book, but maybe, just maybe you will know how to flight a plane.
Rating: 
Summary: Good read
Review: A good but flimsy read. Shallow. Good for sure escapism. Good beach book, but it is already the end of summer.
Rating:
Summary: Not his best, but a good way to spend a few hours
Review: Follett is good, even when he's bad. I found too many contrivances to make this more than a formula plot for a rather ordinary B movie. Peter Fleming had a grudge against the Olufsons, but I would have believed it more readily if he had been motivated simply because he was a policeman and he was doing his duty. His handicapped wife was a cheap trick to get reader sympathy, and his treatment of her was abominable. He also didn't treat his cohort very nicely, either. I didn't mind the technical jargon pertaining to the plane, but found it beyond credibility that those two kids could actually fly that thing. The ballet was there only to allow the girl to get a sprained ankle; the Nazis were portrayed as being stupid and careless. This is a potboiler, but I still enjoyed most of the first 90%.
Rating:
Summary: An Exciting, Satisfying Thriller From World War Two
Review: The nice thing (if you can call it that) about World War Two in Europe was that the bad guys were so thoroughly bad. Ken Follet is a master of World War Two thrillers. In this tale, the Germans are shooting down British night bombers so readily that it threatens the survival of the British war effort. British intelligence deduces that the Germans have a new way to track British bombers, but they have not been able to identify it. It falls to Harald Olufsen, an eighteen year-old physics student in German-occupied Denmark to stumble across a secret, German installation near his home that looks like a collection of bed springs. He deduces that it is a new sort of antenna system and tells his older brother, Arne, about it. Harald doesn't know that Arne gathers information for the British. Arne suspects that the Germans and Danish police are after him, so he reluctantly asks Harald to slip into the German installation and photograph the antennas. As the Germans learn of the photos and close off all escape routes, it seems impossible to get them to England. The only possiblity is a damaged Hornet Moth biplane belonging to the family of his friend, Karen. As the Germans and Danish police close in, Harald works frantically to get it to fly. The suspense is great throughout the story, the characters are believable, and the plot twists to overcome repeated barriers all make sense. This is another outstanding book by Ken Follet.
Rating:
Summary: Not his best, but I still love KEN FOLLETT
Review: Like some of the other reviews, the book is predictable, but follet's writing is just great. he is so easy to read, very enjoyable, i always look forward to his next novel. I heard rumors of a sequel to the pillars of the earth, that would be great.
Rating:
Summary: Nazi Resistance like you've never heard before.
Review: This story is set in World War II, where a small group of Nazi resisters are determined to do what little they can to save Denmark. A young boy named Harald, barely a teen from the sounds of the book, yet architecturally and electronically a wizard intellectually, comes across a fenced in area one night as he is on his way home. Tired, he realizes if he jumps over the fence and crosses the 300 yards to his house, he will get there much quicker. Once he has jumped the fence, however, it is then he realizes there is this huge satellite dish, along with two other tiny dishes that tilt back and forth. He doesn't know what this means, but with his incredible forte for electronics and architecture, he soon finds out it is indeed radar, and that is why the RAF keeps losing all it's fighter planes. Soon, if this continues, the RAF will lose the war. He must enlist the aid of his older brother Arne and his girlfriend Tilde and Arne's fiance to help him photograph these disks and fly them to England in what amounts to nothing more than a bi-plane. This is an edge of your seat thriller, as more than one person is captured by the Nazis, yet the Danish resistance, although tiny, is born. World War II lovers will recall that the Danish resistance was one of the strongest resistances at the end of World War II. There is one small yet brave reason for this. I gave it four stars. Technical jargon about the inner workings of a plane elude me and throw me off the rhythm of books (such as Tom Clancy with his submarine stories), but I stuck with it and am glad I did. A fine read, one worth putting a little heart into.
Rating: 
Summary: Very Disappointing
Review: Ken Follett is my favorite author. I have read every single one of his books, bar none. Bar none, this was poorest book he has ever written. The settings, characters, and story line are classic -- you can pick almost everyone of them out of his previous WW II era novels. It has a lot of plot similarities to Eye of the Needle and Jackdaws. However, the overall plot is extremely predictable. You can see just what is going to happen after reading the first 25%. The details however revolve time and time and time again on a whole series of coincidences which is very out of character for Follett. I liked most of his books because the story line follows a logical flow with interesting bobs and weaves stemming from an initial premise. This was more like a low budget movie where things happen by coincidences and characters survive by inches or seconds so many times it becomes unbelievable and ridiculous. The climatic seen of the flight to England has to be the absolutely worst piece of writing ever by Follett. The events are ridiculous, the characters repeatedly make stupid errors, and the whole thing plays like a cheap B movie. For instance, are we to believe that the only character who knows how to fly the plane falls asleep during a night flight over water half an hour after almost being shot out of the sky -- and the inexperienced person that's awake lets her sleep? Or the king of them all, are we to believe the character waits till the airplane is within minutes of running out of gas before remembering to add the extra can of gas he has in the cockpit -- which he could have done 4 hours earlier? Or how about delaying a day the flight that will change the war and save thousands of lives so that the main character can go to the ballet? Or how about the German guard helping push the plane out for takeoff because he can't put two and two together? He must not be related to the other character that can throw a cigar into the cockpit of a small airplane at takeoff speed. Come on Mr. Follett, you can do better. Your novels Eye of the Needle, Pillars of the Earth, Key to Rebecca, Night over Water, Hammer of Eden, and Dangerous Fortune were classics.
Rating:
Summary: Entertaining
Review: This is a fun book to read. If you allow yourself, you'll be swept away by the plot. For me it was a fast read. It was addictive almost in the way a soap opera is. You want to find out what happens next, but don't expect much depth to the characters. Certainly their histories are given and their emotions are reported, but it has about as much reality to it as a read-back by a court reporter. If you want a fun light easy adventure book, this is a good one. It's easy to get caught up in the plot but it's unlikely that you'll be sucked in to the point where the characters seem real to you; you'd have to suspend a lot more than your disbelief for that.
|
