Let me start out by saying that originally I was planning to wait a while to read and review The Bourbon Kings. However, I decided to go ahead and read it now because I’ve wanted to read it for months, and I couldn’t stop thinking about how excited I was to read The Bourbon Kings. Right off the bat, I have to say that I absolutely loved this book. That being said, I’m just going to come right out and say that while I loved this book, there’s no denying that it also has a lot of problems, which I’ll get to later.
The main thing that I love
about this book is the fact that it’s basically a soap opera in the form of a
book. I’m a huge fan of soap operas, and I typically love just about anything
that has a soap opera vibe to it. As soon as I read the plot description of the
book that’s on jacket of book the first time that I saw The Bourbon Kings at Barnes & Noble, I immediately thought that
the book sounded a lot like a soap opera, and most of the reviews for the book
on Amazon also compared the book to Dallas
and Dynasty. Reading so many reviews
that compared the book to soap operas was definitely the thing that drew me to The Bourbon Kings the most. One thing
that really helps this book to feel like a soap opera is fact that the story
has a big ensemble of characters and a variety of storylines that the
characters are involved in. While The
Bourbon Kings is definitely an ensemble piece, at the end of the day, it’s
very much Lane’s story. He’s definitely the character that gets the most focus
and development throughout the book. I should probably also mention that
technically Lane’s name is Tulane. Yeah, I would definitely go by the name Lane,
too. Tulane sounds like an extremely ridiculous name that would most likely
cause the bullies at school to tease anybody with that name every day of their
life and maybe even beat them up, too.
The Bourbon Kings’ ensemble nature is one of the things that really helped the book to
feel like a soap opera. However, it also definitely leads to one of this book’s
biggest problems, which is that it was often times kind of challenging to keep
track of all the characters and subplots in book. You almost need to make a
very complicated chart to keep track of all the one trillion characters in this
book, the numerous subplots and which characters are involved in each of the
subplots. While the book doesn’t actually have a trillion characters in it,
this book does have a lot of characters to keep track of, and unfortunately too
many of the characters were woefully neglected and left underdeveloped, if you
ask me.
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