With some books you can tell after reading the first few lines that they are going to be good. This was not one of them - quite the opposite in fact. As I read In the Shadow of the Cypress I had to keep encouraging myself to keep reading. I had to keep telling myself, since I was reviewing it; I needed to finish it in order to give an accurate review. With that said, I can say with the utmost confidence and sincerity that In the Shadow of the Cypress is one of the worst books I have ever read.
Every aspect of this book is painfully, gut-wrenchingly, eye-stabbingly boring. The dialog, the narration, the story, everything was bad. In fact the only positive I can think of is that, thankfully, it’s less than 250 pages. This book is basically a poor effort at a Dan Brown-esque mystery about the Chinese discovering America before Christopher Columbus. It sounded like a very interesting premise and coupled with the recommendation by a Random House editor that Thomas Steinbeck wrote like his father (John Steinbeck; Of Mice and Men, Grapes of Wrath, Cannery Row, etc.) I was incredibly excited to read this book.
What I got instead was a ‘mystery’ that required very little thought and a book that read like a final paper of a freshmen community college creative writing course. Thomas Steinbeck seems to be an author who loves his extensive vocabulary more than putting together a quality story. It is very clear from reading this book that he made several trips to his ancient Oxford thesaurus to pick unnecessarily academic words and had a checklist that included the task of writing at least four to five descriptive words before every noun or verb.
After the arduous task of reading the book I have come away with three conclusions. One, Thomas Steinbeck is not his father. Two, Thomas Steinbeck is probably only a published author because his last name is Steinbeck. Three, you should stay far, far away from reading this book.
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