Robin, Robin, Robin, what the hell was going on with you when you were writing this? Were you off your meds? Past deadline and feeling lazy? Going through a drunken spell? The word Shock describes how I felt reading this. I like the idea behind it but the execution was really sloppy. I suspect even some of the characters were shocked at finding themselves in this book.Joanna Meissner and her room mate Deborah Cochrane are in a PhD program at Harvard. Joanna is an economics/computer systems major while Deborah is in microbiology. You wouldn't guess it from their stupid and outrageous behavior. Deborah is the freewheeling one who sees relationships as a game and is passed from man to man , fully in touch with her inner whore. Joanna comes from Houston and somehow feels that getting married, having kids, and being a housewife is where it's at (so why is she getting a PhD) and there is a presumption that Robin Cook makes here that he makes in his other books that it is an either/or thing where women are concerned. You can get a top notch education and have a satisfying career OR you can become a housewife and mother and become a drudge. It never occurs to him that you can be a wife, mom and educated career woman just as a man can enjoy a career and be a husband and father. Do join us in the 21st century Dr. Cook.I also hate sloppy research. The two women keep talking about doing a PhD thesis. If Dr. Cook could be bothered to research, he'd know that a master's degree candidate does a thesis. PhD students do a dissertation based on a long period of deep individual research under the guidance of a faculty member and then must defend it. He treats it as if the gals are off to do a undergraduate term paper! At the beginning, we find that Joanna has been dating Dr. Carlton Williams since 9th grade and has been pressuring him to get married since then. It is said they have been dating for 11 years yet how is it they were 15 when they started dating and have dated for 11 years yet somehow she is supposed to be 23 (26 is more likely?). Also, if Carlton is also her age, how is is he has finished 4 years of college and 4 years of medical school and is in a residency? That would put him at about age 27 or 28. Cook needs to get his act together here. Okay, let's roll. Our story involves these two graduate students who are friends and roommates. Though Joanna has been pressuring her fiance for 11 years to get married and they are engaged, when he tells her that he thinks they should wait and marry once he finishes his residency since he is on call for days on end and gets no sleep and isn't making much money and feels that they would be in a better position to start life with residency behind him when he has a job. Joanna's reaction is to break up with him and tell Deborah she no longer ever wants to be married. She just wants to do as Deborah does. Deborah has what she thinks is a brilliant idea. She saw an ad in the Harvard student paper. An infertility clinic wants to purchase eggs from college students who are smart,skinny, athletic, beautiful, and under 24. Wow. That describes our girls. Robin Cook only allows the stars of his book to be super model gorgeous. The clinic will pay $45,000 to collect the egg, payable the second the work is done, and Deborah has it all planned out. They will donate eggs, grab the money, buy a condo, and then spend a year living in Italy writing their "theses". The only thing they would be writing is a dissertation and that would need to be written alongside research under supervision but Robin doesn't let that trouble him. Pesky details. When they call about the ad, one of the doctors runs to their apartment that afternoon. They are signed up and ready to donate. What they don't know is that this clinic, locked in a fortress that used to be a mental hospital turned tb hospital, is not on the level. They are stealing ovaries from women, impregnating hispanics then aborting them at 20 weeks to get eggs from their unborn fetuses, and doing human cloning, including putting fetuses into pigs. Oh and the doctor is serving as daddy to all the babies despite the fact that he has a genetic based problem he is passing on.Our gals are blissfully unaware that one of their fellow students woke up during her procedure, was killed accidentally and then had her body and that of her very living friend who drove her there dumped (after their ovaries were stolen). This is NOT a nice place . Deborah insists on local anesthetic and can't figure why this makes the doc mad. Joanna takes the general and winds up missing more than eggs- she loses a whole ovary. Naturally this means the two women must investigate as Joanna becomes obsessed with finding out if any of her eggs resulted in a pregnancy and then seeing the kids. Deborah thinks this is crazy but goes along.Here is where Robin was a slouch about research. The ladies decide to get jobs at the clinic where they had the procedure, a place with about 40 members of the staff. Of course they had seen them but the ladies decide that no one will remember them after a year if they just color their hair and dress differently. Uh huh. This may work with a 3 year old watching Hannah Montana (if I just put on a blonde wig, no one will know I am Miley) but not in the real world. You still have the same voices, faces, bodies, and car. How will they manage this? To get a job, one needs a social security card and photo ID. They decide to take on the names of recently deceased young women who died in accidents. I will grant that you can find that info in the paper but you will NOT get access to any death certificate you want. Birth certificates and death certificates are only issued to the person listed or the next of kin and you have to show photo ID to prove it even if ordering by mail. They will not have the social security number on the death certificate. In fact, Social Security is notified at the time of death and the number will be marked deceased on their computer. Somehow Robin had them do it anyway and of course they were hired on the spot, even with no photo ID or ss cards. Deborah wants to work in the lab but dresses like a hooker which gets the old dude who owns the place to think she is hot (while the repressed christian security guard thinks she is a slut and must be killed- he kills whores in his spare time, murder for the lord, you know) and he tries to have a three way with them.There is some heartpounding action and a lot of running, sneaking into labs, and other Cook staples. Some more unreal circumstances include Carlton , a first year resident, being able to get Joanna into his hospital for a free ultrasound done by another resident (oh sure, don't all hospitals allow this) to find if her ovary has been stolen. The end is about as unsatisfactory as can be. If you can even call it an end. Oh, yes, it is a Shock.
Robin Cook's SHOCK is a page-turner--but only to the extent that one wants to get to the end so they can start reading another book.I'm giving SHOCK a barely-deserved two stars because the premise was somewhat interesting. The book opens with a young woman donating her eggs (in exchange for a hefty sum of cash) at a fertility clinic. The procedure goes *very* badly and not only does the donor not survive, nor does her friend who drove her to the clinic. Apparently, these are *really* bad people.Jump ahead another year or so and two young Harvard PhD candidates see a print advertisement for egg donors (from the same clinic). The pay is astonishingly good, and they both decide it's worth whatever small risks there are in having the procedure. From the moment we meet these young ladies though, it's clear that something is off with them. And what's off is the writing... the dialogue between them is stilted at best and as the story proceeds, it's not only the dialogue that becomes unnerving... it's their actions.I'm okay with fiction. I'm even okay with "fantasy" fiction. Stephen King gives the reader a young girl who can start fires with her mind in FIRESTARTER? No problem. Ghosts coming to life in THE SHINING? Again, not an issue....as long as there's an understanding that the author isn't trying to pass fantasy off as fact.But in Robin Cook's SHOCK, the actions of the characters themselves is simply off-the-charts ridiculous. The main characters might be ivy-league-educated young women yet I kept getting the impression that they had just stepped off the "short bus." In more than one scene they're carrying on a conversation with each other "quietly," even though the individual(s) who are well within earshot would likely figure out they're committing a felony as a result of what they're saying.I can't count the number of times that I put the book down while muttering to myself, "ARE YOU KIDDING ME?!"I won't give away the ending, but as any number of other reviewers have noted, it was abrupt and completely unsatisfying. I got the impression that Dr. Cook was up against a deadline and decided to delete 25 pages just to wrap things up in a single sentence and fire off the manuscript to the editor.Open this book at your own risk!
Do You like book SHOCK (2006)?
The story is ridiculous, however it's entertaining enough to want to finish it. Nothing special though. I can't understand why the book is called Shock? I think this book had potential to be cool if it would have be written by a different author. Hmmmm....Likes:- story idea (cloning, organ stealing, etc)- the bad guy who killed prostitutes in the army, he had potential to be way cooler- whole book practically takes place over 2 daysDislikes:- almost completely unbelievable!- It had a "made for TV" feel to it. Zero bad words, minimal violence. Whole thing felt censored. - Shock??? The most random name for this book. Certaintly no signs or symptoms of shock....no electricity shock....no shocking moments....i have no clue.
—Ev
It's my opinion that the book was published incomplete. There were a number of inconsistencies and loose ends.#SPOILER#1) Why would the Wingate clinic bother paying premium prices to harvest ova when they could have paid the market rate (which would be less suspicious)? Also, why specifically ova from Harvard undergraduates when the nuclear material is removed anyway? The same biological results could have been obtained from just about anybody's eggs. (Eventually the eggs were taken from Nicaraguan women which is more consistent). Anyway it would stand to reason that highly educated women would probably be more likely to have access to medical facilities that would reveal the loss of an entire ovary, and might probably get more riled up over the deception.2) The book didn't explain why Joanna's ovary was more pock-marked than the ovaries of the two murdered undergraduates even though that seemed to be a major plot point when Cook mentioned it. It seemed that he intended to write more about it, except...3) The book ends leaving us in doubt about the fate of the two girls. Perhaps that was intentional; however, I feel that it doesn't add anything to the reading experience of this particular book. In other cases it might be a useful literary device to have the reader ponder certain ethical/moral questions at the end of the book, or the fate of the characters, but definitely not for this. Oh well, might have just saved us the pain of the cheesy ending. Maybe he was rushed to publish or something.Besides the unanswered questions, the characters were classic Cook: academically intelligent but amazingly naive and also exceedingly impulsive. You get two attractive, well-formed Harvard post-grads who are armed with massive intellectual capabilities who decide to commit major felonies in order to have a look at the babies that came from the ova they sold to the Wingate clinic. Let's just say that the debate that ensued over the ethical aspect of this just lasted a maximum of 5 lines before they decide to break the law in the most spectacular way. That is disappointing considering that Deborah is a Biology graduate who should be intimate with the ethical and moral problems regarding genetic engineering.There is a lot of dialogue in this book, as with Cook's other books. However, the characters always say exactly what they are thinking, unless Cook intends to have the character blatantly lying. There are no raging internal debates. Thought processes are rarely outlined. This makes the characters less complex. Although I can sympathize with them, I cannot feel empathy in the slightest. Another reviewer is absolutely right on the money: "If he isn't able to tell us explicitly what he happening, we don't find out, at many times a detriment to the already lackluster story."There are instances where I feel more could have been written. For example, I would feel extremely violated if an ovary were removed without my consent or knowledge. It would be something akin to having a kidney stolen. There are parallels: these are both accessory organs (kind of, you won't die with only one) that most people would rather have a full complement of. Kind of like running a hard disk configuration in RAID, y' know!? Sure, you can probably mother hundreds of children with just one remaining ovary, but what if it stops producing the necessary hormones? What if you get ovarian cancer on the remaining one? What if there is a blockage or medical condition in the fallopian tube on that side? All I can say is that Joanna accepts her discovery of the missing ovary with incredible equanimity.Her ex-fiance as well: acts like a total douche but ends up worrying for her and calling the police. Some kind of deus ex machina, I guess. More could be written about him -- I would love to know why is he so weird!??!I find the book more entertaining than the Twilight novels, because one of the main characters wears a miniskirt throughout the novel, and also because both chicks seem hotter than Kristen Stewart. For some reason this book reminded me very much of the Nancy Drew stories.
—Bi Xian
Me molestan los spoilers, y más si están en el libro. Por ejemplo, no lean la contraportada de los libros de La trilogía de la Oscuridad, y tampoco lean el prólogo de este libro (De hecho, ni la portada deberían ver)...Personajes con reacciones y objetivos ILÓGICOS, trama agarrada de los pelos, y un final super previsible (tanto el último capitulo, como el epilogo).Una decepción, porque mucha gente me habia recomendado que lea algo de Robin Cook, pero bueno. Libro un poco menos que pochoclero. Empieza muy bien, salvo por el prologo, y despues todo se va a la mierda.
—Nicolas Stolfa
