Sunday, April 21, 2013

Warm Front / Mark A. York



Reviewed by: BigAl

Genre: Thriller

Approximate word count: 90-95,000 words

Availability    
Kindle  US: YES  UK: YES  Nook: NO  Smashwords: NO  Paper: NO
Click on a YES above to go to appropriate page in Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or Smashwords store

Author:

“Mark A. York is a journalist, biologist and novelist. He has worked as a carpenter, actor, and fisheries biologist all over the West and Alaska, and was a full-time reporter at The Livingston Enterprise in Livingston, Montana. He has written a blog that focuses on environmental issues since 2003 and wrote special projects in 2011 for the Idaho Mountain Express in Ketchum, Idaho where he resides.”

York has a few other books available, although non-fiction and this is the only one currently available for the Kindle.

For more, visit York’s blog.

Description:

“A scientist warns of an imminent, catastrophic climate change.

An eccentric reporter exposes the truth about man-made global warming.

A billionaire philanthropist has the money to make the solution happen, and the three join forces.

But a powerful Senator and his lobbyist friends stop at nothing to oppose them.

The planet doesn’t wait.”

Appraisal:

Taking a subject that most of us should probably understand better than we do, especially a controversial one like climate change, and teaching the reader about it while entertaining them in a novel is a great idea. Warm Front integrates the science of climate change at a level understandable by a layperson, as well as addressing some of the common objections raised by climate change deniers.

In the acknowledgements section, York says the science in the book is accurate, and for those with doubts, he’s footnoted some of those things that might be questioned as well as included a bibliography for those who want to dig deeper into the subject. The characters are likeable and realistic, most of the time. At a high level, this is a good story, beyond educating the reader.

However, things start to fall apart in the devilish details. I spotted enough typos and proofreading issues to consider the book marginal in this area, although far from the worst I’ve seen. There were events that stretched my ability to suspend disbelief. Specifically, each of the two main characters was almost run off the road, one of their planes vandalized more than once, both were shot at, each was threatened in other ways multiple times, and both a car and plane crash happened under suspicious circumstances, yet there was never any sign that law enforcement was notified more than once, possibly twice. Last, there was a tendency toward extended narratives, giving the reader too much unneeded detail, which caused the story to bog down. I’d still recommend Warm Front for the overall story and as a relatively painless introduction to the science of climate change, but only for a non-critical and forgiving reader.

FYI:

A couple instances of adult language.

Format/Typo Issues:

A moderate number of typos and other proofreading misses.

Rating: ** Two stars

2 comments:

Walter Knight said...

Global warming is not a science, it's a political opinion. It's presented as science to stifle debate. You're carbon tax is coming soon.

Mark said...

And a carbon tax should come. Global warming is science but it's politics for people too ignorant to understand basic high school science.