Rebecka's Reviews > Close to Shore: A True Story of Terror in an Age of Innocence

This book suffers from the same disease as Isaac's Storm, that unpleasant new mix of fiction and non-fiction that, miraculously, seems to be very popular among readers. I don't get it. I was immediately suspicious when I read the author's disclaimer at the beginning of the book, stating that all of it *was* true and that any speculation was based on sound reasoning etc. That made it pretty clear what was ahead.

When I read a book about shark attacks, I don't particularly want to read speculations about the sharks mental state of mind and ridiculous accounts of its exact movements (as if it had been filmed back in 1916 and the author was describing what he was seeing). I want to read about the facts! But, if this book were to only contain facts, it would be an article. That's how little factual material there is here. The rest is this or that person walking down the street wearing this or that, turning around that corner there and admiring the sun, feeling the breeze on his face, thinking about his sister in the garden, and bla bla bla.

Another issue that does not only apply to this book in particular is the repetition of words. Today, when it is so easy to check the number of occurances of a word in a text, well, perhaps some authors or editors should do just that? "Hullaballoo" three times within like 50 pages is perhaps a bit much? And how many instances of "Victorian" are there really here? Or "man-eater"? The author does not tire of the idea of how Victorians were obsessed with ideas of sea monsters and how the shark represented their dark innermost thoughts or whatever.

I was annoyed the whole time I read this.