This is an American novel that analyses post 9/11, post Obama America in such a way as to bathe it in bright flourescent light, all it's failings and weaknesses shown as plain as day. And another plus side - it teaches you how to survive should you ever get marooned on a tropical island. The corny wordplay and ridiculous geographic nicknames peppered throughout the book are just painful to read. It was really weird, seeing the family growing up, and dealing with different issues than had arisen in the first book. That’s the plot of “Savages” which is an entertaining one, but where the novel succeeds is in it’s three lead characters.

He succeeds beautifully in spinning a bare-knuckled, blistered-pace drama of crime, suspense, and passion that explodes in a climax fitting of the carnage and emotion that precedes it. The result is a provocative, sexy, and darkly engrossing thrill ride, an ultracontemporary love story that will leave you breathless. To the outsider the Savages might look like the perfect family, but there is more to them than meets the eye.This review appears on my blog along with my thoughts on the movie adaptation: http://justaguythatlikes2read. His writing, his tone, his slick as shit story-telling are all intelligent, original, hiply sparse and kick-ass coolio. I have to admit that only a few people have read this on my recommendation and they were not as sold as I was but so what. Despite the gritty and violent nature of the story, the book is also laced with a black humor that has a lot to say about how goddamn silly this country can be at times.

Although the author had also written the book Lace, this book wasn't as trashy as I thought it would be. This slowed me down, where really the use of acronyms is meant to foster a zippy reading experience. It turns out that there is actually almost no sex in Savages, so it doesn’t really qualify as a bonkbuster at all.It’s a mixture of macabre family tradition, romance, cover-up family business and American lifestyle… Sounds bizarre, but Matt Whyman makes it work. And ultimately the style is also kind of annoying, and achieves any effects by skipping past those other things that a fuller style achieves: developed character and fully realized scene and so on and so on. The male characters tended to be sterotypical but you expect an author to have greater insight into characters of the same gender. It gripped me from the start and I was eager to see how the characters survived what happened to them - without giving anything away! O knows that Chon is seriously twisted-no, she knows Chon is seriously twisted-but not like day-old-spaghetti-in-a-bowl twisted, like getting off on guys getting their heads lopped off, like that tv show about the British king, every cute chick he f**** ends up getting her head cut off.