Customer Reviews

Ravens

5 star:		(15)
4 star:		(12)
3 star:		(13)
2 star:		(8)
1 star:		(10)

 

 

"Ravens" offers a stark cover, an ominous title, and an interesting premise--all of this bolstered by sterling words from Publishers Weekly and respected authors. I'd never read a book by this writer before, but I was drawn in quickly by the moody prose that is reminiscent of Joe Hill's "Heart Shaped Box," both in tone and characterization.

Shaw and Romeo are two drifters, friends from way back, who happen upon a chance of a lifetime when they get the inside scoop on a family who's recently won a monster lottery jackpot. They swoop in, raven-like, to claim half by coercing the unsuspecting family through threats against their immediate loved ones. I settled in for psychological suspense and tense pacing, only to find myself slipping into disbelief. How could these bumbling criminals pull this off? How could this family fail to make any intelligent efforts to free themselves? Yes, there's a whole messiah-like complex that begins to evolve around Shaw, but even that is built on a stereotype of Bible Belt religious wackos that tries to be Jim Jones like in one scene and devil-may-care in the next.

The characters are deftly drawn, the dialogue superlative, and the settings rich in detail. However, the endorsers' warnings of "cold shudders" and a "devastating" conclusion all failed to pan out, and in the end I wondered who was supposed to get the payoff here? How could an editor fail to help such a talented author turn these puzzle pieces into a truly thrilling, truly moving story. I, for one, was left feeling cheated.

RAVENS is George Dawes Green's first novel in fourteen years, and it qualifies a moderate disappointment. While the book has some strong points, it contains some severe flaws that hampered my enjoyment of it.

The storyline of RAVENS is pretty simple. A working class Southern family hits the lottery, and a pair of would-be criminals demand half their winnings. If the family doesn't meet their demands, the criminals threaten to kill them and others close to them.

Not a bad idea for a suspense thriller, but Green doesn't spend enough time fleshing out his plotline. Events occur in a forced manner without much build-up or explanation. The result is a rather sketchy tale that I ultimately found unbelievable and half-baked.

On the plus side, RAVENS does contain two very well developed characters, most notably the reluctant criminal Romeo Zderko and the lovelorn cop Burris. The scenes involving these two men are very enjoyable to read -- they are both fully defined characters whom I found quite compelling.

But there are about ten other key characters in this novel who are not nearly as well fleshed out. Many of them are portrayed as little more than white trash stereotypes -- unlikable and borderline stupid. Unfortunately, these characters dominate a big part of RAVENS, which make large sections of the novel quite expasperating to read.

Ultimately I think you can do better than this book. If you want to read a gritty crime novel about greed and hoplessness in a small town setting, my advice is to instead read A SIMPLE PLAN by Scott Smith or THE ICE HARVEST by Scott Phillips. They are far better plotted and have better fleshed out characters than what I found in RAVENS.

Ravens kept me turning pages and then spoiled it with the incredibly lame ending.

*SPOILER ALERT*

The thing that bothered me the most about the ending is Burris offering to help Romeo kill himself by telling him to go for the gun on the floor so he could riddle him with 4 bullets. WHAT?!?!

By now it's clear he is an average cop at best but do you mean to tell me he's going to kill Romeo in cold blood in front of two witnesses? Why would he do that? One of those witnesses was the woman who he's loved for 40 years who doesn't even know at this point that Shaw and Romeo were bad guys. Gimme a break. Romeo posed no danger at this point, plus now that Shaw is dead he would be the number one witness besides the family to back up Burris' case and save him from getting fired.

I couldn't see Tara shooting Shaw either.

My ending would have went something like this:

Tara points the gun at Shaw but doesn't have the nerve to pull the trigger. Shaw, enraged that she would even consider it, attacks her and smacks her around in a fit of rage. Nell rushes to save Tara, Shaw struggles with Nell, and shoots her in the arm or something just as Burris busts in. He sees Shaw shoot the woman he loves, Shaw points his gun at Burris, and Burris fills him full of lead.

Romeo begs Burris to shoot him too, but since he poses no threat, Burris cuffs and arrests him just as more cops swarm to the house. Nell sees Burris as a hero and maybe falls for him at this point, who knows. He gets promoted to Sergeant, the family get's all the dough, Tara doesn't have to kill anybody etc.

Actually, now that I think about it I'm sick of the standard ending of movies and books where the bad guys always have to die at the end. It's such a cop out. I don't think either of these two clowns did anything bad enough to warrant a death sentence. Throughout the book I never got to the point where I couldn't wait for them to get their asses kicked or killed. I think it would have suited the story better to have them both go to jail instead of get killed.


One more thing that bugged me about the entire book was the way all the characters? They talked in questions? Most of them did that? For one character that would be ok because I suppose some people talk like that but not everybody!

"Romeo was driving down from the Blue Ridge Mountains in the baffling twilight, going too fast, when a raccoon or possum ran in front of the car. The impact was disturbingly gentle. No thud -- just a soft unzipping, beneath the chassis. ..."

So begins RAVENS, the premise of which I knew going in: Romeo and Shaw, en route to Florida from their tech-support jobs in Ohio, stop in Georgia and decide to co-opt half of a huge lottery prize from the winners. But what *surprised* me was that the opening paragraph concludes by painting the villains as likeable ("...Still, it tore at Romeo's heart. He braked and pulled over") and, further down the page, as smart and playful. And what *hooked* me were the next few pages, where I developed an intriguing dislike for the "good guys" -- the lottery-winning Boatwright family.

The novel's strength is its ability to hold me in that incongruence. It also held me in a state of suspended disbelief -- after all, who'd believe that the winners of $318 million would acquiesce when a couple strangers announce they're taking half? Yet every time I wondered about the believability of characters' actions, George Dawes Green showed me their motivations and brought me back in. It's a fun, comic novel (not all of it dark comedy), populated by an entertaining ensemble of small-town characters; subplots and twists that are well earned; and suspense that is more compelling (inquisitive; page-turning) than scary. Recommended!

This is a riveting, comic-creepy, contemporary tale that tingles up and down your spine. Subversive, menacing, and riotously perverse, Ravens pairs and expands the concept of Stockholm Syndrome with the messiah complex while turning it on its head. Two men seize an opportunity to secretly hold a family hostage for half of a winning 312 million-dollar lottery ticket, captivating an entire town into believing that it has its own savior.

In the grim and grey, blue-collar, Bible-Belt town of Brunswick, Georgia, the grim and grey Boatwrights have miraculously won the Max-A-Million lottery. Mitch Boatwright, the timorous, Scripture-bound head of the family, together with his shrewish, alcoholic wife, Patsy, live with their two children in disturbing disquiet. Believing that the jackpot is their chance to marry happiness, Mitch and Patsy swear their family to secrecy, not wanting to divulge their winnings right away to the community.

The two swindlers, Shaw and Romeo, are traveling through from Piqua, Ohio. Shaw stops at the service station where the winning ticket was sold, and with the combination of right time and right place, learns of the big-ticket win. He subsequently hatches a scheme to extort half of the money from the Boatwrights, luring Romeo reluctantly into the deal. Preying on the willing vulnerabilities of Brunswick's citizens and the chronic turmoil of the Boatwrights, Shaw swoops in and frightens the family into cooperating with his plan.

The prose bewitches with a heinous, acid crackle that horrifies but seduces you. Shaw's outrageous gall is convincing in dissembling a town into cult worship, paying homage to Michael Valentine Smith in Stranger in a Strange Land, but with less vision and more malice and greed. The most unforgettable character, however, is Romeo, a confused, pathetic, but reverberating mixture of self-condemnation, altruism, and rueful loyalty. The author's ingenious portrait of this doomed and contradictory man is ripe with a tragic pathos generally reserved for the hero or anti-hero. He is in a class by himself--a blighted, inchoate, but compelling mirror of skewed humanity.

This strange and allegorical parody of blind faith will grip you in its talons from the opening pages and shock you; frighten you; humor you; and thrill you until its merciless end.

This book was an unexpected pleasure. After reading the blurb, I thought this would be a suspense filled thriller, likely to end in a bloody mess at the end like so many thriller/horror movies. I started reading with some trepidation, but was immediately sucked into the story. Well, maybe not into the story because there really isn't a lot of plot or story here, but into the work itself.

This book is a wonderful set of character studies loosely tied to the whole kidnapping/terror plot. There are jewels here, tightly written snippets of conversation and memory that reveal volumes about the personalities involved in just a few well-chosen words. Romeo especially offers a wealth of pain, confusion, and love wrapped up in the persona of a tough guy who is much more a lost boy. I definitely preferred Romeo to Shaw as a character, and found his to be a more believable back story and personality.

Given that I sat down meaning to read just a few pages and ended up pushing through to the end, this book obviously succeeds in engaging the reader. I would have given it five stars if I had been able to better understand the power that Shaw seemed to exert over people. The whole cult that sprang up around Shaw was a little too unrealistic for my taste, but otherwise I was quite impressed by the character sketches delivered in Ravens. Highly recommended 4.5 stars.

Ravens is a psychological suspense novel that will keep you hooked until the end. Patsy Boatwright has just won the Georgia State Lottery, a total of 318 million dollars,something that she has been dreaming about forever but it has turned out to be a nightmare. Two young men passing through the Boatwright's home of Brunswick hear about the win and Shaw McBride has a plan. Romeo Zderko his traveling companion and faithful follower would do anything for Shaw including killing.

By posing as a state lottery representative Shaw weasels his way into the Boatwrights home and proceeds to terrorize them, convincing the family that Romeo will kill their family and friends if they don't give him half of their winnings.

The story builds and the reader is captive as well, wondering how it will all end. Ravens is an excellent read and even better as an audio book.

There are several very colorful characters in this book. One is Shaw, who comes up with a scheme to extort half of a hundred and twenty-four million dollar lottery jackpot from the rightful winners. There's Romeo, Shaw's slavish follower, who is willing to murder several people as part of the extortion plot. Both Shaw and Romeo are cheap punks, but author George Dawes Green manages to swathe them in layers of angst, sensitivity, and, even, compassion.

The victims are the Boatwrights, who emerge as just plain folks who take their Christian faith seriously. After learning that they have the winning ticket, the Boatwrights react with unbridled joy. They have the usual visions of mansions by the sea and luxury cars. But the next day, Shaw and Romeo appear and start tearing into their dreams like, as the title suggests, hungry ravens.

I feel the greatest strength of this book is the character development, for the plot becomes somewhat loopy. A key player is Burris, an aging town cop who is mockingly known by the locals as "Deputy Dawg." His life has been overloaded with frustration, including his failure to win the affections of Nell, the mother of the man who bought the winning ticket. Burris has been spinning his wheels in his pursuit of Nell for an incredible forty years! Green brilliantly describes both Burris and Nell as well as several other people as he captures the small-town atmosphere of Brunswick, Georgia.

Some reviewers have said this book is "comedic." I thought it was about as funny as a heart attack.

In 1993 George Dawes Green published a fabulous first novel -- The Caveman's Valentine. The protagonist was a homeless and mentally-ill Julliard graduate who lived in a cave in a Manhattan park, and the mystery that unfolded in the novel was definitely not a run-of-the-mill whodunit. Caveman was an exciting and highly original debut. Green followed it with The Juror, a well-written thriller that lacked the Caveman's striking originality. Dawe's latest novel, Ravens, is also well-written but lacking in originality as promised in his first outing. More importantly, Ravens' story covers ground quite similar to that trod by another truly original writer, Carl Hiaasen, and Dawes' novel falls short of the darkly wonderful masterpieces of satire that Hiaasen has produced.

Ravens is a modern gothic set in the south of Bible churches and rote religion, strip malls and fleabag motels, struggling small businessmen and grifters passing through on their way to Florida. The story centers on the Boatwright family, which has just won a $318 million jackpot in the Georgia State Lottery, and two losers from Ohio, Shay and Romeo, who decide to extort half the money by promising to kill the winners' family and close friends if grifters don't get the dough. Dawes sketches in a large cast of characters -- the earnest breadwinner, the bored wife with a drinking problem, the bright daughter looking for a way out, the bumbling and forlorn cop nursing a 40-year crush, the free-spirited widow with a poker jones, the chip-on-their-shoulders grifters hoping for one big score -- and a plot that takes an unexpected turn into a weird religious revival as the Boatwrights and their tormentors wait for their payday. The novel is well-written, the story moves briskly, and the end result is an enjoyable read. But nothing about Ravens lingers in the reader's mind after the book is closed -- there is no character so memorable, no plot element so original, and no insight so unforgettable that the novel takes up a permanent place in the reader's mental architecture. That's exactly what we expect and often get from Hiaasen, the master of modern southern gothic who created the ex-governor turned Everglades hermit Skink. Dawes did it once with his Caveman, Romulus Ledbetter, and like many fans of that first novel, I eagerly await the day that he does it again.

I was looking forward to a good story. The story and the idea of the story was good, but the last three pages, that is the ending, was so NOTHING that I ended up very dissatisfied and feeling like I wasted my time reading it.