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All Meat Looks Like South America by Bruce McCall
Arrowsmith by Sinclair Lewis
The Black Island by Georges Remi Hergé
The Blues of Flats Brown by Walter Dean Myers
The Bungalow Mystery (Nancy Drew #3) by Carolyn Keene
The Cave by Steve McGill
Chicka Chicka 123 by Bill Martin Jr. and Lois Ehlert
A Civil Campaign by Lois McMaster Bujold
Dewey: The Small-Town Library Cat Who Touched the World by Vicki Myron
Duck in a Truck by Jez Alborough
Enemies and Allies by Kevin J. Anderson
Frozen Tears by Mary Ann MacAfee
Haven Stones: The Last Unicorn by Richard Carbajal
Humanism for Parents — Parenting without Religion by Sean Curley
Hurricane by Arnaldo Ricciulli
I Spy Christmas by Jean Marzollo
If I Ran the Zoo by Dr. Seuss
Immortality Inc. by Robert Sheckley
Mars: The Red Planet by Isaac Asimov
Monsters! Draw Your Own Mutants, Freaks & Creeps by Jay Stephens
North from Calcutta by Duane Evans
Perseverance: True Voices of Cancer Survivors by Carolyn Rubenstein
Read Me edited by Gaby Morgan
Resonance by A. J. Scudiere
Right to Remain Silent by Penny Warner
Sahwira: An African Friendship by Carolyn Marsden
The Shining by Stephen King
Son of the Great River by Elijah Meeks
The Sun by Ralph Winrich
Swann's Way by Marcel Proust
That's Not My Dinosaur by Fionna Watt
Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There by Lewis Carroll
What the Hell is a Groom and What's He Supposed to Do? by John Mitchell
Wolf Willow by Wallace Stegner
You Suck by Christopher Moore
Your Inner Fish by Neil Shubin
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North from Calcutta: 11/03/09

I read through ten reviews (see below) of 0981945406?North From Calcutta by Duane Evans before beginning my own review. All except for the one on Business World, an Indian site, were positive. While I am also giving North From Calcutta a negative review, my reasons are different.

The positive reviews site a fast paced plot, realistic dialogue and a unique plot. I must have been reading a different book because the plot for me crawled, the dialogue seemed wooden and written with an American ear and the plot while perhaps set in a part of the world not recently covered by espionage stories, isn't unique. Sure, there are nuclear weapons involved this time but otherwise it wasn't much different than the underlying plot of Kim

More than anything, though, it was the narration (the how the story is told) instead of the narrative (the actual events in the plot) that made me put the book aside. Every page was filled with repetitive phrases to the point I wanted a red pen to edit on the fly. The action scenes didn't fare any better, being told in the passive voice and the subjunctive tense. Action scenes need action verbs. Short sentences and phrases. The rhythm of the words should match or mimic what's happening in the story. It doesn't in this book. Instead, the action scenes read like a book report, and a boring one at that.

I received a copy of the book for review. I have since released it through Bookcrossing.

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