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Title: Grunge
Series: Monster Hunter Memoirs #1
Author: John Ringo, Larry Correia
Rating: 2 of 5 Stars
Genre: SFF
Pages: 320
Format: Kindle digital edition
| Synopsis: |
Oliver Gardenier, aka Gary Stu, is a boy wonder with some seriously messed up parents. He joins the marines in defiance of his mother and ends up talking to St Peter and given a mission back on Earth: to hunt Monsters. Joining up with Monster Hunters International, Oliver details his adventures.
He also details his seriously messed up theological thoughts on Jesus and God. And just in case you forget, he also states, over and over and over, how successful with women he is.
| My Thoughts: |
If this had been just an MHI story, it would have been awesome. 4stars easy, pushing 4 1/2.
First thing that pushed it down was Gardenier’s continual references to his womanizing. He justifies it by saying he doesn’t want to leave a widow and orphans behind when he inevitably dies on the job, but that is so much BS. He’s probably leaving a trail of byblows who are growing up without a dad and string of woman who wanted more than a night. Those excuses lead into the second, and bigger, reason.
Theology. Ringo, and he is the author of this book, not Correia, presents sin as something just kind of ‘meh’ and that Jesus is our Dude who tells God to chill out on our behalf. In fact, Ringo/Gardenier states that you have to do something REALLY bad to go to hell now. Ringo threw around enough biblical names, terms, etc that it is obvious he’s at least familiar with Scripture but simply choosing to twist it to allow him to do whatever he wants.
Once past those, like I said, it is a tremendous MHI story. I’ll be reading the next book but with some serious reservations.
Bookstooge's Reviews on the Road 
Without having any real understanding of this series (since I’ve not read it) – are you attributing the theology to Ringo because Correia doesnt reference such in the original series?
I laughed out loud at the Jesus and chillaxin’. It reminds me of Kevin Smith’s version. Yikes.
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Correct. And in the intro, it is stated that Ringo wrote this book and the next and Correia edited them to fit what he has imagined so far but not released.
Correia is also a Mormon [not sure how devout or practicing] and it shows bigtime in the latest MHI book, Nemesis. But even then he stayed away from explicitly stating theological ideas.
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I jist read your review on the sequel and obviously I had to check out the first hahah I’m so sorry to hea ryou didn’t enjoy this one as much 😦 and those BS that you called out 😂 – Trang
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Glad you clicked back. The 3.5 on Sinners might not seem that great, but in comparison to this 2, that is a huge step up 🙂
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