Reviews for Whatever Happened to the Good Life? : Or Assessing Your RQ (Recreation Quotient)

The average rating for Whatever Happened to the Good Life? : Or Assessing Your RQ (Recreation Quotient) based on 2 reviews is 2 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2016-09-27 00:00:00 Albert Baur When an inexplicably slaughtered pod of killer whales washes up on the beach, a pair of oceanic researchers find themselves drawn into a reign of terror that threatens to engulf the entire sea. What new horror has the ocean spawned, and can anything stop it? TIBURON is an energetic, fast-moving novel that introduces a fresh variation on the "killer shark" genre. Writer Edward Holsclaw keeps the story running with plenty of gory action and a strong sense of foreboding and mystery. The two protagonists are likable and every time they sally forth into the ocean the reader knows something terrible is waiting for them. And unlike many contemporary novelists, Holsclaw doesn't let his story get away from either himself or the reader, and the adventure rushes along to its explosive climax in just over 100 pages without ever losing steam. So why only three stars? Despite its exciting plot, TIBURON suffers from inconsistent writing and sloppy editing. Choppy spacing, inappropriate quotation marks, and comma splices were common throughout my Kindle edition. Moreover, while Holsclaw has come up with a page-burning plot, his prose style is hit or miss. Though at times the writer conjures some truly ethereal word images, there are just as many passages that are nearly painful to read. As for dialog, Holsclaw seems to think most people are incapable of putting together a complete sentence without stuffing in one childish vulgarity after another, and that gets tiresome pretty quickly. A little editing could have cleared up many of these issues and made TIBURON a much better reading experience. Finally, the story leaves a lot unexplained. Not only do we never learn much of anything about the story's monsters, such as where they come from or how they accomplish some of the nearly preternatural things they do, but there are hints that the Bermuda Triangle, where some of the story takes place, is somehow involved and that it is exerting its haunted influence upon our characters. Sadly, this is only briefly touched on, and it's never clear what the Triangle really has to do with the story, or if it actually has anything at all to do with it. Despite its stylistic issues, TIBURON is a very entertaining book that kept this reader turning the pages at a rapid clip. The author packs a powerful story into a short novel, and in so doing gives us a lean, engaging tale that never loses inertia. The unfortunate editing and lapses in writing do keep TIBURON from being first-rate, but even so I would strongly recommend it to anyone who enjoys stories of man-eating monsters from the deep.

Review # 2 was written on 2021-07-04 00:00:00 Daniel Pariseau Nope. Couldn’t read this one. Childish writing style. Just couldn’t make myself churn through it.