Customer Reviews

You Don't Have to Be Evil to Work Here, But it Helps

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This is a good one.

A semi-serious caveat: Tom Holt always seems to be writing madly toward deadline,so that he only has time to sketch in the end of his books. So, his ends are often well-worked out, but the characterization and humor of the first 4/5ths of the book fade away.

That's the case with this one. Great twists, great premise, good characters, excellent description, some very funny jokes. But the complicated plot deserves a more fully-realized conclusion, not people explaining things to each other for twenty pages. A few more "seeds" could have planted earlier to suggest the completely out of nowhere meaning of the tree (this isn't a spoiler, we meet the tree at the end of chapter 1). The story wraps up really well, but it's practically a set piece.

But it's still worth reading. (See, I gave it four stars!) Tom Holt is really talented and he's not the only obscenely prolific author to blast through the final pages of his novels to meet some deadline or other.

This return to J. W. Wells & Co with new employees and clients is not nearly as good as the earlier books. The story seems a little re-tread and most of the characters are flat and uninteresting. Pretty disappointing considering how much I enjoyed the others.

May be worth reading just to complete the set. But then again maybe not.

Tom Holt continues to publish delightful comic fantasies. His latest novels include a few about J. W. Wells & Co., a fairly typical bureaucratically fouled up firm, which happens to deal in magic. (The firm's name of course points to Gilbert and Sullivan's The Sorcerer.) As this latest story opens, the struggling firm has been bought out. The new owners are a mystery - but business more or less as usual continues. In particular, a new employee, Cassie Clay, is putting the final touches on a deal to save a widget factory, Hollingshead and Farren, at the cost of the owner's soul. The owner's son, Colin Hollingshead, wonders what is going on while he tries to think of a way to escape the boring job he was born to. But then he and Cassie realize, to their mutual disgust, that they are reincarnations of star-crossed lovers, and that for the sake of the universe, they must be together. But they can't stand each other! Will J. W. Wells's love philtre do the trick? Or is something more sinister going on? Perhaps the veteran employees of Wells, perhaps their most reliable workers, Connie Schwartz-Alberich and Benny Shumway, can figure out what's really going on ... It's all quite funny.

Holt has a great time satirizing business missteps, against the backdrop of the Bank of the Dead, and deals with the devil, other traditional magical devices. The plot is intricate and I'm not sure it really makes sense but Holt talks a good game and surprises the reader fairly often. The romantic leads aren't terribly romantic but they are amusing. This isn't a great novel but it's reliable fun.

Mr. Holt has a nice style and is clever, no doubt, however the book was not exactly what i anticipated. No matter that often happens and i am pleasently surprised. This was not case with this book. I kept reading it hoping it would draw me in, but alas it didn't. I had to put it in the "can't get through this tome stack" which fortunately is a small one for me.

The characters were rather depressing in tone and the plot of the devil purchasing out a struggling firm well, is promising but it didn't deliver the type of humor i would expect from british author. I have read many who have made me devoted fans ( Jasper Fforde for one) but Mr. Holt, i wil pass on your wit.

I got my hands on a copy of this book through my sister. It was in her bookcase and the title and cover looked interesting, so I decided to give it a shot. Normally I do some research on the books I read, but this time I didn't so I wasn't aware that the book was part of a series. This explains one of the problems I had with this book. My advice (as with any series) start with book one, in this case The Portable Door. You can read the book on its own without major problems, but I think it would have been easier to understand the first couple of chapters if I had already known what kind of business J.W. Wells & Co. was.

One of the other problems I had with this book was that two of the main characters, Colin and Cassie, were very uninteresting. They both seemed whinny and extremely passive. Their lives are being turned upside down and they are being pushed and shoved in all kinds of directions, but they wait for other people to save them and solve their problems. Which makes me dislike them slightly. I don't want their problems to be solved because I feel sorry for them; I want it to be solved because it seems like an intriguing problem. The two people who do all the solving and fixing are Connie and Benny. I liked both characters, they had depth and were funny at times. They both felt like they were bigger than this story. You get some hints about their lives before this book, which makes them more appealing.

But my biggest problem with the book was the lack of clues about what was going on. The book has this great mystery about what is wrong with Colin and Cassie. Connie and Benny, Cassie's coworkers, set out to solve the mystery. They find clues and explanations along the way. The problem is that the reader almost never gets these clues. To give an example: on page 195 Benny asks someone to help him identify someone/thing. Here's how the explanation is written in the book: 'Judy explained it to him, point by point and step by step.' That is all the reader is told about the explanation of one of the biggest mysteries in the book. We don't find out what the answer was until the end of the book. This makes reading this book very frustrating. The characters are solving the mystery step by step, but as readers we are not able to solve the mystery with them. You can't even guess, because you have almost no clues.

Having said that I can see what the story could have been. The situation is intriguing, if sometimes confusing. The story is original, even if it's not executed very clearly. I will read another book by Tom Holt, because although at times I got annoyed reading this book, some of the characters were very interesting.

It is not a very complicated story, but not a real simple tale either. It is fantasy, it can be funny, it took a couple of days to read. Good beach material for summer. A B+ book, really.

High praise, considering how much I enjoy pie. Apparently, I really enjoy comic fantasy as well, because after reading this book and loving it, I've been burning through Holt, Pratchett, and others like crazy. The wit is absolutely amazing, and perfectly subtle. It's easy to miss it if you aren't careful or just aren't a big reader. If you like comic fantasy, read this book. If you don't know about comic fantasy (I ddin't until recently, and I'm a major book worm) do yourself a favor and start today with this book. I did and never looked back.
Just FYI. Most of Holt's books are more or less independent of each other, but this was part of a series. However, I never knew it at the time; it's a great stand alone book. some of the places and characters seemed like they were beeing reintroduced instead of being revealed for the first time, but I actually enjoyed that aspect. It felt like it was a part of a bigger world when the author didn't spoonfeed every little detail to me. Still, I usually like to start at the beginning which, for this series, is The Portable Door.

I comb bookstores, wherever I go looking for a line on new to me authors. No one has ever mentioned Tom Holt and I pretty much tripped over him because of some snarky comment by a reader of his who said something unforgivable about Terry Pratchett. Tom is the real deal. I enjoyed reading this book about as much as I have enjoyed reading Jasper FForde's Thursday Next and Nursery Crimes series and certainly, it compares well to Terry Pratchet's work. I would go so far as to say, if you like Christopher Moore's Stupidest Angel, you'll enjoy this one too. I will be reading more of his books in the future, that's a lead pipe cinche. (it occurs to me, I haven't the least idea how to spell cinch...)

Again Tom Holt has combined the unlikely, the impossible, and the routine in a unique way. Great fun again!

I picked this book up on a whim because it looked funny. I have heard of Tom Holt before but have never read any books by him. This book was okay.

I guess you could think of this book as Office Space meets Hell...or something like that. If you throw in a dash of star-crossed lovers and interfering angels and demons then you have this book. Does that help explain it? Probably not. The plotline was convoluted to say the least.

So you have Colin whose dad is selling his soul to the Devil to get cheap workers for his factory so that the family business can compete with Chinese imports. You have Cassie who is the magical go between; you know the person who draws up and explains the contracts that Colin's father needs to sign with the devil(standard procedure obviously). Then you have a rift in space time that's been created because of a couple of star-crossed lovers who can't quite seem to get it right - even though they've been reincarnated numerous times to figure it all out. There is the case of mistaken identity as the powers that be try to fix the star-crossed lovers problem. Also what's up with the tree growing in Colin's parents' house?

If the above sounds convoluted; well it is. This book was not an easy read, it was also not especially fun to read. There were some interested concepts and the writing style was matter of fact, with a British twist to it, and a forced sense of humor. Some parts of this book were mildly funny. I didn't find any of the characters especially interesting. Although the world that Holt created was interesting; everything was just too complicated and the story seemed to chase itself in circles.

I almost didn't get through this book. I had to force myself to finish it. That being said it gets 3 stars (instead of 2) because I got a grand chuckle at the ending . It looks like Tom Holt has a number of books out there that are better than this one. I don't think I will be reading anymore of his books anytime soon. Guess that's what I get for reading something on a whim.
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