Review: Great Story but needs a bit of work on the execution and ending
Rating: 3 out of 5
Date: 08 7, 2012
Most of my reviews are for stuff that I either really liked or really disliked. It is that vast space in the middle from "Meh" to "So-So" to "Could have..." that isn't reviewed by me because they are so hard to grade. Overall, I'd give this a 3.5 as it is now but it would easily...very easily...be upgraded to a 4 with a couple of fixes in a revised version.Those "fixes" are, in my opinion:-Close the storylines! Too many small characters in the story just disappeared or seemed to have real impact and then vanished.-Set the Ending! It's perfectly okay to have an ending where the reader can flesh out the impacts in their own mind but the scene for that has to be set so that the direction is one they confidently take, even when there are a variety of directions. In this case, we didn't have enough information to set those scenes for ourselves, one way or another.-Don't tweak what the various aphabet agencies actually do! Too many people are very aware, or at least knowledgable enough, about what the various agencies do and how they do it for there to be too much deviation from that. CDC has a set and very reliable pattern of investigation and given the unique and very bounded set of initial victims, they would have zeroed in Triple E very, very quickly.All that said, I really did like the story. I know, it doesn't sound like that, but I did. Taking the human desire to constantly push boundaries and combining it with the overwhelming hubris of some of the very successful does (and probably will) create situations where places like this crop up. After all, it isn't old news that if you have enough money, you can go places in the world and eat an animal that may be just 1 of a hundred left in the world. Or smuggle in something vanishingly rare as a house pet. Or have your favority hunting dog cloned. It happens.This story takes all that into a believable near future where it's been done but brings with it the disease that killed them off in the first place. And now, it's spreading to us and all the mammals around us with devastating consequences.The protagonist in the story, a veterinarian by trade for the large animals of a rural setting, is a sympathetic one that most readers will be able to well relate to. Such a job is a pretty hard one, particularly when many of your patients are at least partially related to the food trade. This character walks that line believably and most intelligent people will easily relate to her. And her dog was a great addition.As for the disease itself, I did have a bit of trouble wrapping my mind around it. Prion diseases are, by their very nature, complicated and difficult to really grasp well because they behave differently. After all, it isn't something bad but rather a change in something that is entirely natural so we might think of it almost like cancer to understand it as laymen. Yet it is also contagious, which does not fit that paradigm and makes us think of bacteria or a virus. In that respect, it can take a bit of work to understand the medical aspects of this or simply not accept it and enjoy the story less. It is, as far as I can tell, a very inventive take on the issue of prion diseases and the cross-species barrier breakdown.Overall, I enjoyed the book but would heartily recommend to the writer that they take another turn at wrapping up those loose ends and provide better guidance at the end.