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[starreview]
Classification: Past Time Travel
In Foop! we meet Joe, a tour guide working for Dactyl, a time traveling tourism company. In the first chapter, Joe receives word he is being promoted to Chief of Probes. His first task: find out who’s traveling in time and repeatedly torturing younger versions of his boss in bizarre ways. Very quickly, Joe finds himself in a wacky adventure, meeting bizarre people – and inevitably (as is often the case in this category of book), attempting to prevent the fabric of space-time from unraveling.
Foop! is written in a strange way. The writing style has been characterized as disjointed but remarkably witty and funny. This is actually one of the reasons I got the book – I was eager to try something new and nontraditional. Nevertheless, although strange can be good, I didn’t find the manner in which Foop! was written to be conductive towards pleasurable reading. Who am I kidding – it was painful to read! The book was populated with insane characters doing strange actions. It felt a lot like watching a cartoon meant for 6 year olds; in fact, without any shred of sarcasm, I think this was the goal! It probably attempted to me modern and edgy, and based on other reviews I’ve read, many people believe that it was.
Although Foop! is meant to be funny, in my opinion it was not. Foop! was trying to be clever, and that may be the case (still not sure), but it’s also unbelievably irritating. I will admit that Foop! had some interesting ideas. Perhaps if it wasn’t trying so hard to be witty, and wasn’t doing it in such cartoonishly annoying way, it could have been half decent. I guess I’ll never know – halfway through the book I gave up on reading. Not something I often do when reading, and almost never when reading Time Travel novels.
To summarize: some people have enjoyed Foop!, and it is certainly unusual and original. That being said, I did not enjoy it at all. The reader is welcome to give it a shot at his own peril.
Link to the book’s details on Amazon.com
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