Book Review: The Knowing by David Graham

I really wanted to like this one, but I just couldn’t get into it. The premise was great – as was the promise: mystery, supernatural elements, a book of secrets, MI5, a plot against the Royals… I liked the sample text well enough, but when I tried to dig into the larger book, I just found myself floundering. The teenage girls babble on rather inanely – I know that is the wont of teenage girls everywhere, but in a book I need a little guidance, maybe a roadmap or at least a street sign…

I found myself so far beyond caring what happened to them that I could barely even turn another page to try to get into what was supposed to be the actual mystery (as opposed to merely the mystery of how the three of them had managed to survive this long)… Unfortunately, page after page is what it took – and after countless numbers of them, I couldn’t gin up enough enthusiasm to keep turning them until things picked up. Even the introduction of the detectives wasn’t enough to save this one (Harrison Ford comparisons aside)… They also struck me as rather blah and their interactions as rather randomly uninteresting and inane.

Honestly, the only thing I liked – and I liked it quite a lot – was the evil-cell-phones bit. Talk about promise in a premise – technology as evil seems to offer so many intriguing possibilities… And maybe they were fleshed out in full technicolor glory at some point, but I just couldn’t get past the characterization issues to find out. Very rarely, I stumble on a book where the characters just cannot step out of their own way long enough to let the story tell itself. This was most definitely one of those. It’s a shame, but I just couldn’t stick it out…

My review copy was provided by NetGalley.