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Review: Joe Pickett
The series follows the life of Joe Pickett, a Wyoming-based game warden, and his family in the small town of Saddlestring and the surrounding wilderness of Yellowstone National Park. What did you like best about the series? There was a lot to like about this series. The characters were relatable and by-and-large well written; the location was stunning, but not overwhelming – sometimes the photography can subdue the characters and plot when the setting is this beautiful; while another “police” procedural it had enough new elements to hold my interest. What did you like least about the series? I felt the female characters were a little underdeveloped and secondary. MaryBeth Pickett was a lawyer that gave up practising law so Joe could become a game warden (!), her mother picks by men for life partners, the female deputy is…
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THE SOCIETY
Have you noticed how many books and TV shows have taken the Lord of the Flies premise and run with it? This outing is definitely above average and despite coming across as a YA version of Stephen King's The Dome it holds its own with above average acting, an intelligent plot (once you get over the initial 'how it happened' piece) and a decent take on the "what ifs" - what if there were no adults, what if there was limited food, what if there was nobody to enforce the rule of law, etc.
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THE FAILED GENERATION
PHOTO: Franklin / AP “I was a child in the sixties Dreams could be held through TV With Disney, and Cronkite, and Martin Luther Oh, I believed, I believed, I believed Nanci Griffith – It’s A Hard Life I’m in my mid-fifties and I was a child of the sixties. I grew up with the momentum of foreign protests igniting protest marches in my own country aimed at restoring civil rights to minorities that couldn’t be distinguished by colour, but was based on religious belief. I enjoyed the hope of the technological revolution during the”power years” of my late-20s and early 30s. We enjoyed the drive for equality in a country that at one time lagged behind the rest of the developed word by a decade. Equality brought about by the kind of unity that EU membership offered a…
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THE GREEN ROAD
There's a short list of modern Irish novels I would describe as being privileged to have read - Amongst Women by John McGahern and The Story of Lucy Gault by William Trevor for example. The Green Road by Anne Enright is the newest entrant on that very short list. Anne Enright has been appointed the first Irish Laureate for Literature and this novel alone will demonstrate exactly why that role is so well deserved.
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WRATH OF ANGELS
I realise waiting until the 11th novel in a sequence is not the best way to introduce oneself to a writer or his by now legendary character, but having said that it didn't hinder me in any way from enjoying Wrath of Angels by John Connolly or accepting Charlie Parker as the detective I'd most likely turn to in an emergency. Apparently Connolly writes each novel to be read either as a standalone experience or part of a 'sequence' rather than a 'series' and that paid off for me because while I picked up the existence of a rich past history shared by a number of the characters I didn't get the feeling I was left out of a private joke
