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I loved the parts with Mowgli, but the other stories completely lost my interest, so I didn't read them. They could be good. Maybe great. I will never know.

This seems to be a boring, poorly-written account of a very interesting person's life. I just don't buy many of the claims that are made.

The real James Bond is brutal, cold-hearted, and not a guy you would want to go have drinks with. The character was far more interesting than the one(s) in the movies. The story was surprising - and surprisingly interesting, considering about half of it takes place in a casino. Looking forward to reading more books! The people here who don't like the character's views on females are probably the same people who gave Uncle Tom's Cabin a bad rating for being racist. Times change, literature shouldn't.

After reading Sherlock Holmes and the Army of Doctor Moreau (by a different author), I was really pumped for this one. It seemed to be a similar style book. I got 50 pages in, though, and couldn't figure out who was who or what was going on. New characters kept being introduced, but there was no way to figure out their relationships with others or why they were significant. I've got so many great books in my to-read list, I can't put in more time with something that I'm really not enjoying.

It seems that others reviewed it relatively well, so it's probably just me and my style that is incompatible. Too bad! I had high hopes for this one and others by this author.

Absolutely awesome. I think than I enjoyed it so much because I had read Doctor Moreau and a lot of Sherlock Holmes beforehand. Very readable, exciting, didn't want to put it down.

I was extremely surprised at how much I liked this book. Other reviews say it better than I do, so I'll just throw in my recommendation.

I just put it down, completed. This is one of my favorite books - in fact, I think that Anne of Green Gables is the only book I have enjoyed more than this one. (I think that The Sound and the Fury would round out my top 3, actually).

It is action-packed from beginning to end. The characters are interesting and likable. I can't wait to buy Brock's Railroad, the sequel which is already out, and Brock's Traitor, to be released in the first half of next year. I was happily surprised to see in the historical notes following the book that many memorable parts were actually true stories. The book itself did a great job of adding an exciting fictional layer to this era in North American history.

I would now like to read some Sharpe books, which were inspirational to the author.

Great job, Taylor!

This was the hardest ASoIaF book for me to finish. The last few chapters made up for everything, though. Can't wait for the next one!

This is exactly what I needed after suffering through the phoned-in Ready Player One.

I didn't know whether or not to give it five stars, but I'm going to be thinking about it for a long time and would love to read it again someday (I chose to power right through the book, as confusing as it was, without any outside help). The reader only figures out what the heck happened right at the end. Cool!

I was really looking forward to this. A lot of reviewers gave this really high marks, but I'm terribly unimpressed. The writing style is similar to much of the YA stuff out there, which isn't a good thing. Why would a YA book be written with cultural references which are from the decade before YAs were even born? I'm only halfway through, though, and I'm really hoping that it gets better. It seems like a quickly thrown together story with a lot of retro name dropping, but none of the 80s references are clever. Usually, it's just listing authors, movies or songs. It is impossible to suspend disbelief enough to get past the sloppy parts. How could the hero read every book by every author, see every episode of every TV show, watch every movie - multiple times, in many cases. Some throwaway comments like personal computer storage that holds "3 digital copies of everything in existence" are just.... Gaaaah! I just don't have words for it. Oh well, to each his own, right? I'm glad that so many people enjoyed the book, I just wish I could be a part of it!

Edit: I'm done. I can't change my score... It just wasn't a very good book. It really didn't seem like the book was planned. A lot of things appeared as afterthoughts. For example, the main character got into a scrape with the police. All of a sudden, he explains how the police were about to break down the door, but he didn't mention that he installed a metal cage around his apartment just in case the police would try to break in. No mention of it until this point. He needed to jump or fly to get to a high spot and asked his friends if they had any items to help. His friend had some shoes that could make the wearer fly - but they were never mentioned before or after. The whole book was like this. It Really came off as amateurish. If it wasn't for the retro 80s references, this book would not be popular.

I didn't know whether to give this 2 or 3 stars. A lot of things bothered me about it and it dragged on and on, but I still kept at it.