Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

With almost 100 reviews on this site, and so much publicity, it's discouraging to add yet another. (The chances of this being read are small, and the chances of it swaying any readers are even smaller.) But I am impelled by a kind of irritation. It's a familiar irritation: I gave several days to this book, and it was a waste, and I want to write to someone! Of all the books I have read this year, this is the worst. I agree almost entirely with Simone Oltolina, whose review is currently (as I write this) posted as "most helpful unfavorable review." But I disagree with the reason she says "The Keep" doesn't work. It's not because there are narrative threads left dangling. The problem is more pervasive. It is that Egan can't fill out scenes: she can't describe characters, and she can't even describe settings. The dank pools, castle keeps, dungeons, and forests here have been conjured so intensely, by so many people -- from Novalis to King! -- that it just won't do to have them sketched so cursorily, so feebly, with so little visual sense. I propose this test: take any scene in the novel, and try to picture it. What you'll get is only a Hollywood set, and the details of that set will be from the movies you have seen, not even from the novel. The book is threadbare, and Egan is not a novelist: a least not the kind she hopes, in this book, to be. I am sorry to be so poisonous, but that is what happens when I give my time to a book that is so poor. Maybe amazon's reviews serve a cathartic purpose. I want to put this one behind me, and maybe warn someone else at the same time.