Book review: Swan Song

content/reviews/books/swan-song.md

@@ -0,0 +1,54 @@
++++
+title = "Swan Song - Robert R. McCammon"
+date = 2020-11-18
+
+[taxonomies]
+tags = ["books", "reviews", "fiction", "2020 challenge", "3 stars"]
++++
+
+[GoodReads Summary](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/12972591-swan-song):
+Swan is a nine-year-old Idaho girl following her struggling mother from one
+trailer park to the next when she receives visions of doom—something far wider
+than the narrow scope of her own beleaguered life. In a blinding flash, nuclear
+bombs annihilate civilization, leaving only a few buried survivors to crawl
+onto a scorched landscape that was once America.
+
+<!-- more -->
+
+{{ stars(stars=3) }}
+
+I'm a sucker for disaster movies, so it could be that a disaster book (would
+also pick my attention. And it did, in a way.
+
+There is this huge disaster of nuclear bombs falling over US and Russia, and a
+few survivors have to take care of themselves. All set for a good story, but
+things get in the way of it.
+
+For example, the girl in the title (and summary): It could be interesting to
+explore how someone so young would be a survivor in a place completely
+destroyed, but she shows some special powers that are never explained -- and
+no, it was not the radiation from the bombs, a là Marvel super-heroes.
+
+There is the bag lady in a quest that may be the only story that really fits
+the context: A survivor of the streets, now trying to survive in the rumble of
+civilization.
+
+And there is the plot from the people who got shelter in a made-up bunker,
+which should be used only for recreation purposes ("This is how you'd live if
+this was a real bunker and there was a nuclear strike outside") that got caught
+in the middle, which should be a good exploration, but end up being the story
+that could be ripped out of the whole with very little loss. And sadly, that's
+not just this plot that gets unnecessary stuff: Fights that lead to nowhere,
+longs explanation of clothing people are wearing that affect absolutely nothing
+in the whole and on and on.
+
+On top of that, there is a [MacGuffin
+device](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacGuffin) floating around that is never
+explained how it works, how it came to be, it's used once, in a test, providing
+a complete game changer which is never used again after that.
+
+So you end up with an unexplained phenomena (actually, more than one, as the
+story progressed), something interesting and a bunch of completely unnecessary
+stuff. I read somewhere that there were talks to make the book a movie, which
+would be hard for a 900+ book, but if you consider the amount of stuff that
+doesn't add anything, sure, it fits fine in an around-two-hours movie.