The Rule of Four by Ian Caldwell and Dustin Thomason

This book is kind of old news (I think you read it a long time ago, Mira) but I finally remembered to borrow it from the library this week. I finished reading the whole book in a day, today, in fact, so I figured I might as well review it.

Since comparisons to the DaVinci Code have been inevitable, I'll start with that. I liked this book a lot better, because the characters were just college guys at Princeton instead of that annoying, aging professor running all around Europe, and it was all just easier to swallow. Both were very easy, quick reads, but I actually thought the Rule of Four was better written...some of it was a little too English-major-y for me, but I thought it flowed better.

The mystery part was alright. I'm not terribly interested in ancient texts and codes and stuff like that...I much prefer Agatha's Christie's murder mysteries, which I've been reading a lot of lately. But I thought that the story was pretty well thought out. The present action spans only a few days, with the narration skipping back to the past for most of the novel, but the pace is good and it's not confusing at all. The characters were all pretty well developed and convinced me even further that I would never want to be either a thesis graduate student or professor in the humanities...haha, yeah, engineer speaking here.

But I think what intrigued me the most were the descriptions of Princeton and how life goes on there. I considered applying there when I was in high school, and what I remember from my campus visit was that it all seemed so upper-crust and steeped in tradition. From what I read in this book, I guess my impression was about right. My experience at Cornell seemed so completely different, despite the fact that it was still Ivy League. I kept thinking that a novel set at Cornell would probably be so much less interesting and have so much less character, but maybe that's just the bitterness talking. There's apparently some fantasy novel set at Cornell entitled Fool on the Hill that was written not too long ago by an alum, so I'm really curious to check that out and see how my alma mater transfers to the page. Of course, hey, maybe someday I'll write a book set at Cornell too.