Quote:
Originally Posted by applesauce
I am currently reading World War Z. I am afraid it is a total let down. All the hype had me hanging out to read it before the movie came out. I find it very disjointed, I am just not getting enough meat to connect to any of the characters. You just get a taste of info on a character and bang you have moved onto a new character.
I like to get to know my characters, watch them grow and develop. It just is not there in this book..
applesauce
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While I can understand your POV, I think you just went into it with incorrect expectations of what it was. WWZ is not a novel with the usual 3-Act story structure where a character is introduced, goes past a point of no return to pursue a goal while opposed by an antagonist, and by the end reaches the goal and experiences a change along the way.
The title "WWZ: An Oral History of the Zombie War." Tells you a lot right there and what it says is it's not a novel. Per Wikipedia:
"Oral history is the collection and study of historical information about individuals, families, important events, or everyday life[...]. These interviews are conducted with people who participated in or observed past events and whose memories and perceptions of these are to be preserved as an aural record for future generations. That's why you feel disappointment, it's not really written to tell a story but to preserve "memories" of a fictional event.
Note also that the subtitle is not "Oral History of
A Zombie War" but "Oral History of
THE Zombie War." Brooks's premise was he was preserving a history that everyone in this fictional world lived through. As such, there was no need for a great deal of exposition, background, etc. because he treated it as if his reader was generally familiar with the course of his fictional war.
Again, I can see why you might be disappointed, but if you stop and think about the insanely imaginative way he approached it, I hope you can give it another chance.