As I’ve been struggling through Don Quixote’s second half, I have breezed through a few other books. “Brother Odd” by Dean Koontz was one of the latest.
I absolutely loved the first two books about Odd Thomas. Odd is a very sweet, humble, loving character, and the stories managed to contain humor as well as thrill and suspense. The mix was right, and I was sucked right past the improbabilities into suspension of disbelief.
“Brother Odd” has an odd (pun intended) pace. Nothing really happens for the first half of the book – it’s all forebodings and maybe something’s happened, maybe not. Odd seems a little off, this time – still the same sweet, humble, loving character, but almost too much so. The relationship between Odd and the Russian seems rather contrived at first, although I think, overall, it was one of the best aspects of the book.
The first two books contain few, if any, supernatural elements other than those directly related to Odd and his abilities. This book is oriented around something that at least appears to be supernatural – magic is in the eyes of the beholder, and all we see at first is the completely different nature of the antagonists. Perhaps because of the lack of supernatural entities in the first two books, I had a harder time accepting them in this one. Even receiving the explanation for their presence in the end, it didn’t really work completely for me.
Yet, I enjoyed the book – it was still a good read, but certainly the weakest of the first three Odd Thomas novels.
