Publication Date: November 6, 2012
Jack Reacher’s Rules by Lee Child is a guide to the World of Jack Reacher. Featuring quotes from the series and common sense rules; ultimate fans are able to explore the mind of one of their favorite characters.
I love Lee Child’s Jack Reacher series. I hated this book. The text was as specific to Reacher as Dave Barry’s Dave Barry’s Complete Guide to Guys was to men, but without the great humor of that work. At $9.99 for the Kindle edition of [ack Reacher’s Rules, I feel completely ripped off — not only by the price but for the time this work took to read.
Jack Reacher’s Rules does contain quotes from the series, as advertised, but it had to take whoever wrote this book (if not Child) a lot of work to come up with the most generic and least specific quotes for the series. Enhancing those non-specific quotes is such common sense genre advice as “Never sit with your back facing the door” and “Ring doorbells with your knuckle to avoid fingerprints.”
I don’t mean to overstate the badness of Jack Reacher’s Rules. I have actually seen this sort of thing done by fans for their own favorite character within the genre and, really, the rules haven’t differed all that much. In my opinion, this is not a book that Child needed to write because eventually some super fan would have done it and shared it with other super fans. Something like Jack Reacher’s Rules would have been out there, but by someone not asking $9.99 for each e-book copy — and this reader would have nodded on seeing it and have given it a miss.
I’d be less than honest if I didn’t tell the blog reader that I’m starting to look a bit askance at Mr. Child. He endorses the reasonably bad fan fiction novel by Diane Capri (read our review of Don’t Know Jack) and now he’s releasing a stream of consciousness list of what Reacher would and wouldn’t do. I will continue to read the Reacher books, but I am done taking advice on what to read from this author and buying supplemental releases.
Lee Child’s seventeenth Jack Reacher novel, A Wanted Man: A Jack Reacher Novel was released on September 11, 2012, and received a favorable review on this blog. I would suggest if you’d like to see what Jack Reacher is about, you’ll get a better idea by actually reading the series. Also, check out our Jack Reacher reviews of Deep Down and Night School by Lee Child.
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