Review: The Hunt for Atlantis
Okay, so I grabbed this book off my sister’s shelf because it had been sitting there, unread, for ages, and since I had nothing to read, I thought ‘why not?’ The real question I should be asking is: ‘why?’ As in, ‘why did this book get published?’ ‘why is it receiving such high ratings?’ etc. Before reading it, I was interested, because you know, Atlantis. But as soon as I started reading it, I just realised that The Hunt for Atlantis by Andy McDermott is just a shitty version of a Matthew Reilly book (who I love by the way).
First of all, putting the story aside, the writing of the novel itself was pretty amateur. I probably could’ve written this book better than he did. The descriptions of the action sequences didn’t flow, they didn’t incite feelings of urgency, honestly, it just felt like McDermott chucked a bunch of ‘cool action moves’ together without actually thinking it through. The dialogue was mediocre, I found myself rolling my eyes at the author’s attempt at humour and smartass comments. Reading it, I found myself going back over what I read in order to make sense of what I was reading, and to just think about the context of their situation in accordance with the dialogue written for it – most of it just didn’t work.
Also, the first thing I noticed (and hated) while reading this book, was the fact that there was just too many exclamation marks. Like sure, put some in when someone’s yelling, or something is urgent, but pretty much all the exclamation marks used in this novel were pretty unnecessary and it got quite annoying. Another thing I noticed (and also hated) was the excessive use of ellipses. Sure it created a sense of suspense and such, but once again, most of them were not needed.
Can I just mention the fact that I don’t think referring to someone as ‘British’ is correct when they are just English. Britain encompasses England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland, so unless this guy is all of those nationalities, he’s just English, not British. Okay so maybe now I’m just being annoying, but I just have to complain about the fact that there was this one character, Hugo Castille who absolutely hated helicopters, and every opportunity was taken to remind the reader of this fact. Guess how he died? A fucking helicopter. I’m pretty sure McDermott meant this as some sort of funny dramatic irony, but I didn’t laugh, I just rolled my eyes.
Story-wise, I thought that the process was a little too easy. Like, finding the lost city of Atlantis would be hella hard, and I just feel like everything came too easy to the team hunting it – and they didn’t even get to the actual hunting for Atlantis expedition until like halfway through the book. Also, what kind of bad guys just rely on their mole and the information he provides, to know where the good guys are in order to stop them? How about you work it out for yourself?
Once last thing I want to complain about, is McDermott’s shitty attempt at romance – if you could even call it that. Literally, I think this ‘romance’ was just chucked in at random intervals for the sake of it. There was nothing to lead up to this romance and it was just a shitty attempt in general.
Don’t even get me started on the characters. They all have no depth, and no development.
