Rating: 
Summary: Pot Boiler or Rabbit Stew?
Review: A new Clancy novel great! Adventure, suspense, thrills? If you were disappointed by Dragon's and Bear's you ain't seen nothing yet. This Rabbit's no 'pot boiler' just Rabbit stew. A 'hash' of the usual cast. OK, enough of the cooking cliches. Most of what Tom writes has nothing to do with the story. Tom rightly points out, the British do make the best beer in the world! - but a British pint is 20 fluid ounces not the 16 ounces the wayward eye surgeons are apparently served. What has this got to do with the plot? Absolutely nothing - get the point? Perhaps you could entertain yourself through this 600 page leviathan by counting the bounty of inaccuracies. Nah. Don't bother.
Rating: 
Summary: When is something going to happen
Review: I love Clancy but this book is a bore. Almost nothing happens. Skip this in favor of one of his older books you'll be happier
Rating:
Summary: Disappointed
Review: I like Clancy a lot. But this book is a misfire and a mess. It's even badly (or barely) edited -- typos, historical mistakes, repeated sentences in different chapters, on the whole about 200 pages too long. I'm sure it was hard to take Ryan back to an earlier point in his career, but if this is the result, then either take him forward or drop him. Just re-read The Hunt for Red October; at least it had suspense and plot complications.
Rating:
Summary: Skip it.
Review: Others have said it already. There's no drama. Everything proceeds like clockwork and exactly as you would predict. There's never any sense of danger, no suspense. Do not buy this book! Do not BORROW this book!
Rating: 
Summary: Less Valuable Than Previous Works but Not As Bad As Some Say
Review: Other reviewers here have sufficiently summarized and criticized the book's faults so I won't repeat them here.As a less-than-die hard fan of Clancy's work, my only comment is that Clancy ought to get down off his soap box and lay off the anti-Soviet and anti-liberal dogma (ever notice that the non-military or non-Republican characters tend to be "dysfunctional" in some way in Clancy's eyes? Like the homosexual Democratic Senator, for example, or the Democratic president, Fowler, who can't cope with the stress of dealing with foreign policy and military issues.). If one reads any of his books, like this one, "between the lines," it is really an ideological statement for Conversativism. The stories are usually entertaining and worth reading for many reasons, but the dogma can be annoying. I suspect that Clancy has alienated many intelligent readers because of this, in spite of his usually fascinating foreign policy and national security plots.
Rating:
Summary: Not up to Clancy's usual performance
Review: In the first 400-500 pages of this book, Clancey pays homage to President Reagan and the Catholic Church. Nothing wrong with that, but it doesn't make exciting reading. I greatly prefer any of his other novels. They have action and excitement to keep me up late reading. In contrast, Red Rabbit is slow moving and has a predictable conclusion.
Rating:
Summary: Rewriting history is not a good idea for fiction.
Review: I was rather disappointed with Red Rabbit, precisely because there is a lot of that history that I lived, and seeing it reorganized as Clancy did bothers me. A reader ought to ask the following things. 1. When was President Reagan shot? 2. When and where was the Pope shot? 3. When was the Falklands campaign? 4. When did the great bull market of the 1980s begin? 5. That fall, what teams played a seven-game World Series? 6. When did Leonid Brezhnev die? 7. Did President Reagan first refer to the Soviet Union as an evil empire before that event or after that event?
Rating:
Summary: Dead Rabbit!
Review: As a huge Clancy fan, I bought the book as soon as I could. I wish I had waited and read the other reviews on this site. This book is a disgrace. Slow and without any sub-plots, it drags on and on and provides none of the enjoyment Clancy's earlier works have. I'm not a particularly good writer so I'll refer you to the other "one star" reviews which I think are very accurate. If you have not bought this book yet, don't bother. It adds nothing to the characters that are featured in the other novels and, because it is a prequel, you will not have a gap in the timeline should Clancy be able to resurrect his writing and carry on the series.
Rating:
Summary: A lack of suspence, pacing
Review: In previous works Clancy's ability to build suspense and create believable characters is what sustained the reader through the flat spots, but this book lacks both these characteristics. Further, as noted by others, the dialog is exceptionally wooden which accentuates the poor pacing. (Parenthetically I note that if Ryan calls his wife "babe" one more time, I'll scream; I habitually refer to my wife as "sweetheart" but not every single time! I also note that, contrary to what another reviewer stated, Starbucks was started in 1971 but given it's extremely small size at the time and the fact that it seems to have had no retail stores, Ryan would have had to be clairvoyant to buy stock in it.) Save your money unless you need a soporific.
Rating:
Summary: Next time I'll read the reviews first
Review: That one star should be a zero. Red Rabbit is like a very tedious advert for Clancy's other books - you can't read more than a few pages without coming across yet another reference to Ryan's adventures in an earlier novel. Combine that with factual errors, zero excitement, good guys who never put a foot or thought wrong, no setbacks or plot twists, long and repetitive sections that don't add to or advance the storyline at all, repeated use of the same "background colour" references (James Bond; How many divisions does the Pope have?), and spelling mistakes (Wembly or Wembley Stadium - take your pick; is that a KC-135 or a KC-137 tanker?), and you have a book that should never have been published. Was it read by an editor before publication? If this had been Clancy's first effort instead of his latest one my guess is he'd never have hit the big time. Usually I'll quit reading a book if it doesn't grab my interest, but with Clancy I expected it to get better eventually - my mistake. Don't waste your money on this one, and if Clancy does put out another book - read the reviews first.
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