This book is terrible.

That’s it. That’s the review. You don’t have to read any more about it.

Let’s start with the obvious and most cardinal sin Brown committed with the book: inserting oneself into the book as a character. It’s been known (or at least speculated) for a long time that Robert Langdon is a surrogate fever dream for Brown (or Brown’s alter-ego). By doing so, the MC becomes laughably adept and so many things that you need to suspend reality in a very bad way. At the same time, the MC is very dumb at the things needed as plot devices.

Let’s start with Langdon’s profession as a symbologist. A “renowned symbologist” at that. This is not a thing, and certainly not a thing you’d be renowned for outside of the Ancient Aliens community. Apparently, symbologists know a lot about all the things. It’s a convenient title to plop down when you need a character who needs to be an expert in everything (yet can’t figure out how to decipher a message written backward in English. English is his first language).

Other than knowing all the things, except the things that were bizarrely simple or not laughable fabrications, Langdon is a chick magnet for everything with great boobs. He’s also a crime magnet and is always around when the bodies hit the floor. Strangely, though, at the first crime scene, he becomes an instant suspect because he notices some interesting clues that link together. In this book’s bizarre reality where Symbiology is a thing, and Symbiology is the art of deciphering clues and then linking those clues together, why on earth is it strange that he would … decipher clues and link them together?

The book exists on a different plane—and not a good one—with bad characters, slow pacing, clues that are stupid-easy, and a mystery that not only makes no sense but is easy to figure out by the midway point.

Don’t even talk to me about Brown’s grasp of French or accents. Mon dieu.

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Created Apr 05, 2024 at 3:00pm • Submit your own review...