Dave First Trilogy Bad Reviews

Any book that’s compared favorably to Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy will immediately pique my interest. I thought Dave’s plot summary sounded more like Billy Pilgrim’s misadventures in Slaughterhouse Five than Arthur Dent’s romp through the Galaxy, but that didn’t dampen my enthusiasm.

Sadly, the book isn’t all that I’d hoped it might be. It started out a little bit weird (email correspondence between many of the book’s characters – including the author himself, who thought it would be fun to plug himself several times in the book) before becoming less weird. The actual writing style of the author (in this book, anyway) is non-descriptive and very dialogue heavy.

I’m not one to turn my nose up at a good story with aliens, conspiracy theories, underground rebellions against a tyrannical government, and just a little bit of dystopian mayhem thrown in for good measure. And this book did include all of the above. Plus an overabundance of profanity. And I do mean overabundance. Man, there were a lot of words starting with the letter “F” in this book. And they were pretty much all the same word. With four letters.

The novel is essentially a liberal’s vision of the absolute worst-case scenario for a dystopian United States of ‘Merica. I don’t know if the author came up with the story when Donald Trump ran for president in 2012 or if the Trump-then-Mel-Gibson presidency idea was inspired from the Donald’s second, more successful, attempt to become president in 2016, or if he’s just a little bit psychic and dreamed the story up well before the Donald ever expressed any interest in the Presidency. Prescience aside, there’s not much here. Maybe I’m just not the demographic the book is shooting for (old heterosexual white guy), but I didn’t love the story.

On the positive side, the book was pretty well-edited. There were only a few errors that crept into the text.

In summary, while I’m not telling you that you shouldn’t read this book, I’m definitely not suggesting you should.