{"id":2534,"date":"2004-12-31T15:21:54","date_gmt":"2004-12-31T20:21:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/vardibidian\/2004\/12\/31\/2534.html"},"modified":"2018-03-12T16:47:29","modified_gmt":"2018-03-12T21:47:29","slug":"book-report-the-hollow-chocola","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/2004\/12\/31\/book-report-the-hollow-chocola\/","title":{"rendered":"Book Report: The Hollow Chocolate Bunnies of the Apocalypse"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>If you can&#8217;t judge a book by its cover (and you can), it was a pretty good bet when my Best Reader bought me a copy of <a href=\"http:\/\/www.orionbooks.co.uk\/MP-24078\/The-Hollow-Chocolate-Bunnies-of-the-Apocalypse.htm\">The Hollow Chocolate Bunnies of the Apocalypse<\/a>. And if it isn&#8217;t as good as it might be, it&#8217;s still pretty good. It&#8217;s Pratchett-esque, or perhaps Tom Holt-esque, or something. It would have to be called zany, and there&#8217;s a certain pleasure in just finding out that somebody has come up with this stuff. The humor comes from the juxtaposition of an earthy not to say brutal style with a subject matter more suited to the light touch; I find stuff like that funny, but not everybody does. So if a fairly technical discussion of how to get a Teddy Bear drunk doesn&#8217;t sound at all entertaining, give this book a miss.\n<p>My main complaint is that the titular tasty treat is never really explained properly. I mean, yes, they make their appearances, and it&#8217;s kind of a plot point and all, but the question of <I>why<\/I> a serial killer leaves a hollow chocolate bunny by the dead bodies of Humpty Dumpty, Little Tommy Tucker, Little Boy Blue and Mother Goose (more properly Madam Goose) is never answered.\n<p>My other complaint is that Mr. Rankin appears to dislike his characters and setting, which makes the book less fun to get into. I mean, yes, Terry Pratchett&#8217;s characters are morons, crooks or worse, but he seems to have an affection for them that it&#8217;s easy to share. In general, I think I like to have a sense that the author likes the characters, even if what he or she likes about them is hating them. A really good villain, usually, is the author&#8217;s favorite character in the book. In this book, I think the author didn&#8217;t like or dislike the villain any more than the main character, and that&#8217;s a problem for me.\n<p>I did enjoy the book, though, and furthermore it was pretty much exactly the kind of book I wanted at the time I opened it, which was good luck. There are, it seems, something like a hundred other novels by Mr. Rankin, and I will probably pick another one up at some point.\n<p>Thank you,<br>-Vardibidian.\n<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>If you can\u2019t judge a book by its cover (and you can), it was a pretty good bet when my Best Reader bought me a copy of The Hollow Chocolate Bunnies of the Apocalypse. And if it isn\u2019t as good&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[194],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2534","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-report"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2534","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2534"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2534\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17250,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2534\/revisions\/17250"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2534"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2534"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2534"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}