Red Rain

Red Rain was my Christmas present from Kevin this year. He bought it assuming it would be horrible, but hopefully in a good way. Goodreads reviews led me to believe that this would be the case. But it ended up just being bad in a bad way. It's possibly the laziest book I've ever read.

There's maybe a case to be made for laziness. Certainly when I was ten years old and inhaling Baby-Sitter's Club novels, their formulaic nature was more comforting than off-putting. I was just learning about literature, and that series was a good way to get a handle on common tropes. Goosebumps served the same purpose for many other people my age. So maybe part of the problem was that I was never that interested in Goosebumps, so I didn't have any nostalgia to fall back on.

But the fact remains that this was a terrible book. The characters were flat and unbelievable. Every thing that happened was "just like in the movies", which didn't lead a lot of credence to the plot and rather seemed to be an admission that RL Stine had done only the bare minimum of research. The main difference between this and a trashy kid's book was the characters cussing as often as they could and two highly uncomfortable and unnecessary sex scenes that only made the characters even less sympathetic than they had been.

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