Customer Reviews

Mine All Mine

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

 

 

Good, not great comedy / action / love story novel!

"Mine All Mine" starts out as a smart comedy, then turns into a full blown action novel throughout the second half of the book.

This book is not a mystery, look at the front cover, read about 10 pages into the book and you will already know who the "Rat Burglar" is. If your looking for a classic, hard to figure out "who done it", this definitely isn't it! But I get the feeling Adam Davies did that purposely, the point is to enjoy the story itself.

Alot of great characters, with great names: The Rat Burglar, Jimmy the Hat, Kong, Azar, Po-Mo, Frankie Nichols & Jagjeet Singh

The main character Otto Starks is great! Alot of very current references and themes. There are many laughs in this book and I never really came across any part of the book that I thought was boring.

Other reviews mention Adam Davies tendency to use alot of words no one has ever heard of, that is true. You could keep a dictionary handy if you like looking up words you dont know, but there are so, so many in this book, you may never finish the novel. Ex. - alacrity, maenadic, stentorian, indurate, ataraxia

Good smart & funny book, a great change of pace book, if you read alot of one genre books!

"Mine All Mine" would make a great movie~

I never heard of this author before, but decided to pick this up because it sounded interesting. I was right. It is an intriging story with great narration by the main charater, Otto Starks. The language is very cool and his voice sucks you into the story. I would recommend this book for all fans of crime novels, especially fans of Elmore Leonard or Carl Haaisen. Lots of fun, you will not regret reading this wonderful novel.

The author is my former professor. I am certainly biased. The author used to torture me as a student so of course I read his book. It was the only fair thing to do since he suffered through my papers. One stray grammatical error and this review is all over. It pains me to say the author knows exactly what he is doing.

I read his book in one day. Mine all Mine is very funny. It is the perfect book to take on a flight or to the beach. Otto Starks is a believable hero for a novel because his childhood pain drives him to become a security guard. He has plenty of protective instincts. They just never seem to work as Otto is hopelessly bad at his job.

I related to the main character's desire to achieve something only to find his own life unraveling. The ending is unrealistic unless you believe people really do earn, or deserve a second chance. In real life things would never work out for the main character and he'd be at home on Saturday night keeping a blog.

I hope the author keeps writing. His writing style is not something anyone else on this planet has for one reason. His style is never boring.

Oh, Adam... Your work has been progressively getting less interesting and more...experimental. I guess i'm just spoiled. The Frog King was such a brilliant piece of work. It was comical and tender, and instantly became one of my favorite books ever. Then I read your Goodbye Lemon and, while I enjoyed your writing, I was disappointed that it didn't capture the magic that was The Frog King. Now with Mine All Mine, I have to ask, what the heck happened?

Mine All Mine was a bit too reminiscient of My Little Blue Dress for me with "talking" to the reader and adding footnotes that detracted from the story. Couple these with a touch of Minority Report sci-fi and The Thomas Crown Affair art theft storyline, and you've lost me. I guess my expectations were too high. Mine All Mine would probably be good for your first-time readers and fans of science fiction, but not for those of us who have read your other pieces of work.

Adam, I really hope you return to your roots with your 4th book, whatever it may be. If not, I'll wish you the best of luck and find my reading pleasures elsewhere.

--- Best piece of fiction in a while ---

I found Adam Davies through Amazon (how's that for shilling?). Loved a book called Kissing in Manhattan and was disappointed by Schickler's follow up (Sweet and Vicious) so I was desperate for something akin to Kissing. So I called up Amazon's collaborative filtering. Waded through some bad picks (anything with Sex and the City in the description automatically gets junked as a possibility), and settled on Adam Davies. While looking for Frog King in a library, found Mine All Mine.

Hooked from the second page on. And loved it all the way through. Smart, witty writing that never settles into formulaic dialogue. Great job on characters where you can't help but root for them. It is light, but fun, novel, and fresh. It's definitely distinct writing so you'll love it or hate it. I for one loved it. Probably helped that I read it right after reading the first two books of Dean R Koontz's Odd Thomas series (which I hated -- as much as I loved Koontz when I read him a decade ago, these books were the epitome of Show Don't Tell and felt drawn out like a four hour action movie with no plot -- but that's another review).

It's my introduction to Davies and I look forward to reading his other books. As another reviewer pointed out, I'll have to read them in reverse order so I finish on the strong note that is Frog King.

I have read all of Adam Davies' books in print since "Goodbye Lemon". What drew me to him as an author was the edginess of his writing. His characters are real and rather quite flawed, much like the rest of us.

In "Mine All Mine" we are introduced to a pill popping security guard and an infamous Rat Burglar. The Rat Burglar seems to follow poor Otto Starks around from job to job, stealing all of his Macguffins. He is never killed while protecting these, so he falls under suspicion fast and works to prove his innocence.

Meanwhile, he is hopelessly in love and paralyzed when it comes to popping the question. He just can't seem to get the words out to his girl friend. Otto is shocked when his girl sides with the Rat Burglar instead of him (yet he has never told her what he does for a living). Otto tries to reconcile this all while trying to catch the Rat Burglar to prove his innocence.

Overall, this was a fine book and I enjoyed it immensely. I don't normally read books more than once, but I can easily see myself curling up with this book again in the future.

I thought this would be interesting, but it turned out to be kind of trite. By the first 20 pages I found myself too bogged down with his job troubles, girlfriend troubles, and loan shark troubles to go on. The job of "Pulse" quickly starts to sound too phony. Buying the boat was just stupid. My guess is the girlfriend turns out to be the Rat Burglar, but I didn't care enough to check.