2030 : : the Real Story of What Happens to America

Locations
Call Number: Fiction / Brooks, Albert
On Shelf At: Downtown Library

Location & Checkout Length	Call Number	Checkout Length	Item Status
Downtown 2nd Floor 4-week checkout	Fiction / Brooks, Albert	4-week checkout	On Shelf

June 12, 2030 started out like any other day... until a massive earthquake devastated Los Angeles, and the government, always teetering on the edge of bankruptcy, was unable to respond. The fallout from the earthquake national hope for the future against assurances from the past, in this all-too-believable imagining of where today's challenges could lead us tomorrow.

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COMMUNITY REVIEWS

A poorly written and poorly plotted novel submitted by poihths on June 27, 2011, 7:41pm The bottom line on this novel is that it almost completely fails to live up to its premise.

The premise is interesting: that America in 2030 is so consumed by debt that the United States winds up effectively selling a 50% interest in Great Los Angeles to the Chinese.

The problem is that the author has shoehorned his story and his characters by force into the Procrustean bed of his theme. You can't do that to a novel and produce a book that has genuine life.

It does not help that he is so careless with his characters and their stories that he manages to forget that one of them is married. You can't do that to a novel and expect to hold your readers. You have to establish the basis for story developments to happen; you can't just arbitrarily decide that a given character will do or not do whatever is convenient for your story. You have to maintain your characters as living, believeable people. As soon as you stop doing that and start forcing their lives to bend your your ideas, you've killed your novel. This one winds up stone dead about 2/3 of the way through, and there's no resuscitation possible.

On a sentence-by-sentence level, the writing is poor. The author seems to have no sense of rhythm, no ability to craft interesting sentence and paragraph structures, no skill with language to speak of.

It's a 1. It could have been a 5. It's just too bad it isn't.

Poor Plot, Excellent World submitted by Ryan Burdick on July 3, 2011, 10:01am I agree with poihths, but the ideas in this really develop the what the world will be like in 2030, and I totally believe it. If you're looking for an atmosphere book that'll make you think about the future, this is it. But the story is unfocused and scattered.