Book Review: Personal

Personal

For the minimalist drifter hero Jack Reacher this time around, it's Personal, but for me it was pretty awful, so much that it almost took a month to plod through this. Although I must also admit, I was very much busy the whole time, getting accustomed to a life in a new country. But don't get me wrong, if a book is bad, it's bad. There's no getting around it. And Personal is Lee Child's weakest yet so far. It's as if he's written a book just for the sake of writing one, going through the motions and not putting enough thought. Either it's time for him to hang up the boots on the character or reinvent it all throughout. And that's a shame because the very traits that made Reacher once unique and stand apart has now reduced him to a mere robot. He does the same things he's been doing all this while, mouthing the same lines all over again and again. Even the story is formulaic in that Reacher gets embroiled in a bizarre political conspiracy that becomes so lame a copout that by the end I couldn't care less if Reacher finished what he set out to do. In short, I didn't care about anything that happened in the book. If not for the occasional laugh out loud moments (I'm not spoiling it for you), I would have called it quits.