García's Heart

I just finished a book, and, remarkably, it's only the third one I've read this summer. I feel like such an underachiever. Then again, it's more reading than most high schoolers have probably done in the last two weeks, so I suppose that I'm semioverachieving again.

García's Heart, by Liam Durcan, was pretty good. It was absorbing, and the voice, which walked the line between pretentious and entertaining, leant more towards entertaining. Since the last book I read (The Dark is Rising, by Susan Cooper) was a children's book (albeit an enjoyable one), it was refreshing to see a sentence like "[s]tanding among a group of businessmen in the lobby of the Hotel Metropole and watching them disperse into the Den Haag drizzle, he had already begun to feel conspicuous, almost wishing he could pick up a briefcase and join their ranks for a day of bloodless regulatory triumph" on the first page. However the ending was unsatisfying to an great enough extent that I almost didn't read the last chapter, and when the novel abruptly shifted from dwelling in the past to actual events in the present, the protagonist's realizations felt forced. However, the book did, overall, provide an interesting view into morality and history.