Alek Alexievich Alexievich itibaren Sabaigarha, Jharkhand 828124, Hindistan
The Doll unwittingly becomes a suspected terrorist in a post September 11 Australia. She is hunted down and in the end resigns herself to her fate. This book got a bit tedious in bits, but also had moments of brilliance. Flanagan manages to put the reader right inside the Doll's head.
Maybe I was expecting too much from this book, as it had been recommended to me by friends, but I was underwhelmed. The main plot thread was interesting, and even contained a few gems here and there that made me stop and think. It was also pretty funny, which is difficult to achieve in writing. Yet it didn't really go anywhere or achieve any satisfactory conclusion for me. Furthermore, the side stories that the author wrote alongside the main plot were scattered, tedious, and completely uninteresting. I stopped comprehending anything I was reading about 3/4 of the way through, and flipped through the pages trying to figure out where the hell the story was going. Frankly, it felt as if the author was trying too hard to write a "good" work of fiction and failed, in my opinion. Style-wise, I'd compare it to The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, except, you know, not as good. On a side note, the movie adaptation was pretty good, mainly due to the awesomeness of Eugene Hutz, the lead singer of Gogol Bordello (who also did the soundtrack). Still, Elijah Wood bored the crap out of me, and the ending of the movie was equally confused as the ending of the novel. In conclusion, <3 Gogol Bordello and 3 over-hyped, mildly pretentious fiction.