Review: Tedious dialogue with excessive verbal altercations.
Rating: 2 out of 5
Date: 12 20, 2013
I love history and am a world traveler, but I found many flaws in The Gauguin Connection. And talk about superfluous information. Who wanted to see long lists of various organizations and their functions - even as a student of politics, this seemed excessive. And I felt the author over complicated explanations.I had an uneasy feeling while reading this novel, and I'm not sure why.  Maybe there weren't enough relatable characters.  My wife worked with autistic children for years and we constantly interface with autistic adults, so I felt this POV was a bit off base and too one sided. I've read novels about ultra intellects, watched biographies of autistic geniuses, and still could not get into this dialogue filled novel that seemed to miss the mark when it comes to proper exposition.Lots of contradictory settings/sayings throughout. Perhaps Ms Ryan was attempting to convey a sense of confusion in autistic people, but it felt discombobulated to me.This book might be better for someone who enjoys spending days or weeks (in this case), reading one novel, but for me the dialogue was overbearing and for the most part added nothing great to the story.Again, having autistic people in my life, I have read several novels that outshine this, but apparently many people were able to gleam more from this novel than I. Having to read repeated dialogue filled with caustic discord made me aggitated. I don't enjoy arguing, so I don't enjoy reading about people who do this ad nauseum. Autistic people in my life rarely argue, so maybe this was based on a different level than we are accustomed.