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ipacho's review against another edition
2.0
The fantastic investigative work is thrown to the garbage can by the lame love story, the one-dimensional characters and its terrible pacing.
danicaleblanc's review against another edition
2.0
It was frustrating and not for me and just okay, really. But I chose to finish it. *sigh*
ipacho's review against another edition
2.0
The fantastic investigative work is thrown to the garbage can by the lame love story, the one-dimensional characters and its terrible pacing.
ipacho's review
2.0
The fantastic investigative work is thrown to the garbage can by the lame love story, the one-dimensional characters and its terrible pacing.
shivers_g's review
2.0
The theme of this book was interesting but I found that the story jumps about all over the place and the science babble is way over my head, much of which I just skimmed over in the end.
The author and publishers could have done a far better job of putting together a much more coherent book and it would have been a really good read.
The author and publishers could have done a far better job of putting together a much more coherent book and it would have been a really good read.
beckydouglas's review
3.0
I would never have guessed that Decipher would turn out to deal with so many physics and engineering concepts. Things like gravitational waves, solar minima and maxima and CERN all crop up and I think I can detect inspiration here from people who really exist in some of these fields (surely Rip Thorne is a tribute to Prof Kip Thorne, one of the scientists who might just snag a Nobel prize for LIGO’s detection of gravitational waves?) While the science is sometimes fairly flimsy, I can’t help feeling that, first year undergraduates in physics would get a kick out of this – you could even ask them to critique it as a method of learning more accurate descriptions.
It’s not all hard science, though. The book is kind of sci-fi, fantasy and mostly deals with attempts to find the lost city of Atlantis before a major global catastrophe wipes out the human race. To do this they don’t just need physicists and engineers, but also experts in linguistics as well as theologians. If you need to decipher the hidden messages left behind by an ancient civilisation, you’re going to need a fairly diverse team.
I think to properly enjoy the novel you need to be ready to suspend disbelief and to not dig too deeply into whether or not the science would really work like that (it wouldn’t). Unfortunately, you also have to forgive a couple of awkward plot holes and the mechanisms that are then employed to get around them. Some characters are quite well rounded and realistic, others are less believable and sometimes I’m not sure why they’re there but, with all that said, it is an entertaining read and those 624 pages went by much faster than I expected. I think this is the kind of book Dan Brown would like to be able to write, if he had any good ideas and if he could write about twice as well as he currently does.
It’s not all hard science, though. The book is kind of sci-fi, fantasy and mostly deals with attempts to find the lost city of Atlantis before a major global catastrophe wipes out the human race. To do this they don’t just need physicists and engineers, but also experts in linguistics as well as theologians. If you need to decipher the hidden messages left behind by an ancient civilisation, you’re going to need a fairly diverse team.
I think to properly enjoy the novel you need to be ready to suspend disbelief and to not dig too deeply into whether or not the science would really work like that (it wouldn’t). Unfortunately, you also have to forgive a couple of awkward plot holes and the mechanisms that are then employed to get around them. Some characters are quite well rounded and realistic, others are less believable and sometimes I’m not sure why they’re there but, with all that said, it is an entertaining read and those 624 pages went by much faster than I expected. I think this is the kind of book Dan Brown would like to be able to write, if he had any good ideas and if he could write about twice as well as he currently does.
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