5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
A Conscience?, September 27, 2005
I enjoyed the first two books in the series immensely for different reasons. The first book, while irreverent, dealt beautifully with the concept of an anti-hero who thinks he is a hero. The second book was just a fun romp with a small bit of soul searching thrown in. The third book in the series, Tong Lashing, lost a lot of the humor of the previous two books and seemed overburdened with an almost high-school goth girl search for meaning in life. I appreciate developing characters as much as the next libriphile (pardon my mixing of Greek and Latin), but Peter David should not have tried to turn his amoral anti-hero into a moral hero in the space of a few hundred pages. Tong Lashing, while humrous at times, will leave you a bit put-off by how much preaching David launches into. I'd still read it because I cannot not finish a series, but don't buy this book. Take a day and sit at Barnes and Noble or borrow it from a friend, but don't buy it.
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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
The End, For Now, May 3, 2006
"Tong Lashing" is the third book to feature the anti-hero Apropos of Nothing, along with roughly 115% more puns than is really necessary for anyone's sanity. (David is well-known for deploying both off-the-cuff standard low-brow eye-rolling puns and much more elaborate ones that take half a book to set up.) This current volume takes place in a Davidian emulation of ancient China/Japan (aptly named Chinpan), and Apropos runs afoul of the Forked Tong, the Skang Kei crime family, and the dreaded Anais Ninja clan (headed by the inscrutable Veruh Wang Ho).
David can truly break your heart, though, when he feels like it, which is once per book. And which happens here. The writing is effective, but the books have become very formulaic: pun, pun, snarky observations, Apropos runs away, everyone wants to kill Apropos, Apropos questions whether anti-heroism is an effective philosophy, he tries half-heartedly to do something good and is horrendously punished for it, a villain reveals an unexpected and poignant side, then the big heartbreak scene, and...END.
The page count could've been trimmed easily by dropping a good deal of the relentless internal monologuing over "Am I a good person or not, and is there such a thing as a good person, and why would anyone WANT to be a good person?" and so on.
The author definitely has skills and is not a little daring. I mean, in a single scene featuring three characters (immediately after a climax that some may find borders on troubling territory), he manages to allude to the Christian Holy Trinity, the atomic bombs Fat Man and Little Boy, AND the cult duo of Lone Wolf and Cub. But he needs to shake things up a bit. Every novel he writes, no matter the setting or cast, is largely the same novel. I want to see something different from him for once.
Future adventures of Apropos may not be forthcoming for awhile. David has noted that Pocket Books is not publishing new fantasy novels, but since they have the rights to the existing trilogy, he would have a hard time shopping a fourth book to another publisher. In the meantime, he intends to write some Apropos short stories, but whether those will ever see the light of day is unclear.
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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
An ending from the land of Kopout, September 9, 2003
For almost every page, this book delivers. Fans of the first two books will be giddy with joy, for this book has the same goofy puns, the same sardonic narration, and the same ridiculous names a the first two books. Almost every page is full of all the cynical wit that the first two Apropos books delivered. The story builds wonderfully, and then at the very end of the book there are two . . . plot twists. The first might not be as shocking as Apropos finds it, but the second is way over the top. Together, they forge a conclusion so harsh and sudden, it feels as if the author just gave up. It is as if your favorite football team is winning the Super Bowl, and then they suddenly forfeit and leave .
Other readers may find the ending of "Tong Lashing" rather, well, apropos; but Apropos - and the reader- deserved something better.
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