Much ado about nothing……..  *

WARNING: POSSIBLE SPOILER. I say possible because I don’t think it is, but some might.

Dan Brown is known for his detail in describing places and things, giving us the history of both. The details combined with the various codes and symbolism made The Da Vinci Code a great read. Unfortunately, in Origin, Brown does too much of one and not enough of the other.

Each time a location is changed or a building entered, Brown spends way to much time on describing every intricate detail along with the history behind each. Take out all of the elaborate descriptions and this novel becomes a novella, which brings me to the story itself.

The plot is thin and falls apart once the “big reveal” is uncovered. What had been hyped throughout the book as something that will shake the foundations of all religions, turns out to fail in that regard. The questions of where we came from and where are we going are answered with information that is not new nor troubling.

One of the more aggravating aspects to the way Brown wrote this novel was having characters discussing information critical to the story without making the reader privy to the conversation until later in the book. This trick was used too many times. Also, for some reason Brown kept summarizing or repeating facts as if his readers are not that intelligent. Or maybe he knew after wading through long passages of descriptions and history lessons, the reader would forget what the story was about.

The story is very predictable. Brown has fallen into the trap of using what worked in his other novels to produce an unoriginal boring read. I figured out who the “bad guy” was fairly early, which made this an even more tedious read.

This one gets one star.