The Fox by Frederick Forsyth || Book Review

I really try and read as diversely as possible. Like I really try!

This includes reading books with representation of life and people that usually aren’t popular for plot and character choices. Luckily, if you look around long enough, you’d find what you’re looking for.

While the representation of a character in this book hits home because I want to say, ‘I understand him‘ – the representation of the circumstances around him didn’t hit the mark for me. When taking on a representation of some sort, you need to really be focused on it and this book did nothing of that sort.

DISCLAIMER: This review could contain possible spoilers based on my opinions. All opinions and views are my own.

Book review: The Fox by Frederick Forsyth #bookreview #frederickforsyth #mysterybooks #espionagebooks #booktwt #bookaddict #booktwitter
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Originally published: 2018

Pages: 307
Format: Paperback

Plot from GoodReads:

The Fox is based on the stories of British hackers Gary McKinnon and Lauri Love and centres around an 18 year old schoolboy with Asperger’s Syndrome who is able to penetrate intricate firewalls to access the secrets at the highest level of foreign governments and other major organisations.

Thoughts:

The plot was there but there was no effort to go into detail about the hacking world and what it really involves.

This book is basically about cyber warfare and who can hack who the best to extract the most crucial information from the enemy.

The writing was a little lazy and there was little research included to really explain the hacker world. It was a case of ‘this is how it is, I don’t know how to really explain this but I’m just going to go with it anyway’. Things happened too easily, and I don’t care how brilliant you are in the profession, you still have to hit some walls to make it more realistic to the reader. Throwing around a bunch of buzzwords doesn’t make it believable.

It felt like all the problems were solved too quickly without the ‘good guys‘ suffering anything significant.

There was serious lack of character development, even with all the difficulties faced throughout the book. The characters were one dimensional and boring, except Luke and he was hardly made significant as an individual but instead just a tool for people to use to get things done for their own gains.

Overview:

It was great to find a book with a character that has Asperger’s Syndrome and be able to understand the character from the beginning, but sadly for the important role that he had, he hardly had any real representation in the book.

Everything in the book worked out too well in the book and hardly anything was believable.