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There are currently 18 member reviews
for The Lotus Eaters
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Sharon W. (Columbia, SC)
The Lotus Eaters Does Not Mesmerize
A book with as much promise as The Lotus Eaters should be able to earn the highest reviewers' marks. Instead, I expect other readers will experience the same level of disappointment that I did.
I approached my reading of this novel with excitement. The Viet Nam conflict was the war of my generation, and the women's movement came into mainstream America during my twenties. What could be better than a novel set in the Viet Nam of the 60s with a female combat photographer as the main character?
As I turned the last page, I realized I was deeply disappointed. Although Tatjana Soli excels at narrative description, her plot structure and development are mediocre and juvenile. I tripped over too many syntax problems, anachronisms, and unexplained non-sensical acronyms. I realize this was a pre-publication draft, but no good writer should let such sentences loose in the world.
I would like to have been able to give a better review, especially to a writer who seems gifted at evoking a vast sense of time and place. Soli, however, needs to do some serious work on character and plot development.
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Barbara S. (Brick, NJ)
Stereotypical
Do all war correspondents and photographers use their working conditions as an excuse to jump into sexual relationships at the drop of a hat, overuse alcohol and drugs, gamble foolishly, setting aside their own rules of decent behavior? Or do authors want us to understand that "war is hell" and this is the only possible way they can deal with it while covering the atrocities? Love came too quickly to Helen so that set the tone for the story not having believability. There was a gap in the story that was never explained. I felt that Soli was able to depict Vietnam clearly and accurately. For those of us who have never seen war first hand, it is always such a shock to read it. Soli shocked me with her descriptions.
I wish she had paid as much attention to the characters as she did to the vividness of the country and the war.
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Peg M. (Durham, NC)
The Lotus Defeaters
After more than a month struggling through this novel, I surrender. One hundred pages from the end of the book, I am no longer willing to give any more of my time or effort to this novel, The Lotus Eaters. While some of the descriptions are rich and evocative, they cannot counteract the flatness of the characters. I don’t care what happens to any of them. This reads like a screenplay, headed for the stage – and it may make a fabulous movie, full of intrigue and lust, cityscape and jungle – but the book itself is just is tedious.
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Ilene W. (Royal Oak, MI)
The Lotus Eaters
First novels, as The Lotus Eaters is, are usually some of the finest reads. But the plot of this book was like an endless loop: the heroine, Helen Adams, is afraid of photographing the Vietnam war and equally afraid of what the other journalists think of her. Then she faces her fears, is successful, and goes on to cover the next battle, afraid of photographing the ... you get the picture. I saw no real character development and we know as much about Helen at the end of the book as at the beginning. The plot slogs along, with some predictable events. What redeems this book, however slightly, is the insight it gives into the Vietnamese culture.
