Customer Reviews

Past Perfect: A Novel

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(10)
2 star:		(11)
1 star:		(23)

 

 

I am a huge Susan Isaacs fan, and although I have liked some of her books better than others, I have never read one of hers, well, tried to read one of hers, that had bored me to tears. I was half way through the book, put it down, and tried to pick it back up to finish. Oy vey, could not do it. This story is so boring, and the characters are so boring, I just can't believe this is Susan Isaacs. I wonder if she was busy and someone else wrote it for her!!! Sorry Ms. Isaacs, I'll try again next book.

I am sooooo struggling to finish this book. It just drags on and on. The plot is thin. There is a dearth of action. But what really makes it bad for me is how very very cutsie the lead character, Katie, is. Bleah. I expected better from Isaacs. I'm not sure I'll finish it.

I used to love Susan Isaacs' books -- "Shining Through" being one of my all-time favorite books. Unfortunately, this books continues the trend of her more recent books: namely, short on plot, long on the cutesy cleverness of our heroine, in this case Katie Schottland. Katie has it all -- adorable son, handsome, caring husband, doting parents, great job, financial success. But she just can't seem to get over the only bad thing that ever happened in her charmed life: her firing from the CIA 15 years ago. "Past Perfect" gives us 337 pages of explanation of why and how that happened, blended in with a less than enthralling back story of CIA dealings at the time of the fall of East Germany in 1990. Excuse me while I snore.

I have to finish a Susan Isaacs book - but as I approached the end of "Past Perfect", I almost wished I hadn't. The single stream of consciousness I have for the heroint, Katie Schottland is "get over it already!". Katie, like most of Isaac's heroines, is interesting, has found her way into a great career in television, and has a strong marriage and great kid.

But she cannot forget the fact that she was fired from the CIA for no apparent reason....a call from a former colleague (that she didn't even like) promises to shed some light on her release, and Katie begins to dig and dig, in a way I can only describe as paranoid.

2 stars instead of 1 for the great character that is Katie's father! I like the fact that Isaacs takes time between her novels (instead of producing one a year) so that she can develop a great story and a sassy heroine. This time, she failed.

This is my second long-anticipated but utterly disappointing book in a week (the other being The Double Bind). Past Perfect took forever to get moving and then nothing much happened. I started thinking about giving this book up after Katie recounted for at least the fourth time that there had been armed guards watching her pack her office after she was fired. Then when I started skimming and came to the sentence "at last I knew why I had been fired from the CIA" and realized I had 1) missed that explanation and 2) didn't care in the least, I thought I'd donate this to the public library for some other unwitting victim.

This book is so boring I couldn't believe it. I have read all her books but this one couldn't engage me initially, and I finally skimmed my way through it just so I could see what happened in the end, not that I cared. Very formulaic, if there's such a word. After awhile one gets very tired of all the wise cracks and side comments, and you want to take the author by the shoulders and say "enough already! get back to the story!" what little of it there was.

I'm afraid I have to agree with the majority of other readers here who were disappointed in this Susan Isaacs novel. Again, I've read all of her other books, and loved or at least liked them all. I'm afraid she's way off the mark here. If you're a huge Isaacs fan, you'll probably go ahead and read it anyway, but you'd be better off passing on this one, for all the reasons others have already described.

Brought this book to the beach, and it was so bad I contemplated throwing it into the ocean, but I decided burning it might be more satisfying. I kept hoping the plot would pick up and get exciting, or maybe the main character would stop being so pathetic, but this book proved to be a waste of $4.98. I'm surprised that "a strong drink" isn't listed as one of the items customers buy immediately after viewing Past Perfect, because that's what I was wishing for after reading 2/3 of this novel.

Okay...so I didn't believe the others when I read the reviews. I LOVE Susan Isaacs and always give "Shining Through" to friends who are taking long trips and need captivating reading. But this is one of the worst books I've read. Did she NOT have an editor?! The character descriptions and her writing style are so intriguing in the beginning. But a plot never develops. The final fourth of the book is completely ridiculous. The action sequences don't make sense, the characters become unbelieveable and the story is resolved in a laughingly unrealistic way. (Like an attorney with the CIA would ever apologize!!) It's like the author started writing an interesting novel, got bored and just put words down on paper to finish it. Pass on this one!

I was very disappointed with this novel. I love everything Susan Isaacs writes but this was definitely not worth the time it took to read it. The plot was convoluted and not terribly interesting and rather repetitious. I finished it but I didn't care what happened to any of the characters. I guess I was hoping Susan would pull it out of the yaawwwn.

She didn't.