Forever And A Day Review

James Bond fans this might surprise you but i've not even read a James Bond book heck i've not even seen any of them in shops and so when I was looking for a book to take on my holidays I was shocked to not only find one but it was also the most recent book in the franchise so here is my review of Forever And A Day.

The plot of the book is 007 has been killed in the city of  Marseille and it's up to newly promoted James Bond to find out what's going on and more importantly who did it. Honestly the story is pretty simple and very easy to follow but having it set before Casino Royale means that this book falls into the same traps that all prequels do because we know that the main character isn't going to die because there in another book so it kills any suspense.

Out of all the MI6 regulars only Bond , Bill Tanner , M and Miss Moneypenny make and appearance so that means there's no Q Branch and that means no gadgets and I have to say that while having gadgets does make for exciting sequences in the films I imagine that its quite the opposite when it comes to the books and indeed out of all the MI6 regulars apart from Bond only M and Bill Tanner have some sort of impact on the overall plot that really could have removed Money penny and nothing would have been lost story wise.

Of course there are many more characters so as guest characters we have the likes of Scipio a French criminal , Sixtine a possible ally , Reade Griifith a CIA agent helping Bond and there's another character as well but for the life of me I can't remember his name. I will say that it's good to know that the CIA have more agents other then Felix Leiter but that said it would have been nice to show how those two characters met which they very well might have done in the book version of Casino Royale but to many myself included he really is Bond's greatest American ally.

Now then since i've only seen the James Bond films I will be making comparisons to those films since there my only exposure to the franchise and with that I found this books Bond Girl to be rather forgettable character wise she's not bad and indeed it is good having a character who your not sure if you can trust or not and who is indeed a lot older then Bond but did she have to be for freaking forgettable even as i'm writing this review i'm struggling to think of a single memorable thing about her and I can't think of anything at all.

I'm not exactly sure why this is but I kept on reading Bond's lines in Sean's voice and for the life of me I have no idea why that is perhaps it's because he's the first Bond in the official series and this is Bond's first mission as a double 0 but that's really the only reason I could think of but to make things even weirder I didn't read M in Bernard lee's voice.

The book was written by Anthony Horowitz who is the most recent writer of the official book series and he is the only one to write more then one book in the franchise and I have to say that while he is a very talented writer in this book I found his writing to at times be bad and boring he has an entire chapter dedicated to a characters backstory and all of it isn't relevant to the story and the sole purpose of the backstory is so he could work in the name of the book and that's really it heck it doesn't even add anything to the character in question.

Speaking of that backstory it really didn't need almost an entire chapter dedicated to it it could have been summed up in just a few paragraphs so why he chose to go into that much detail I have no clue but that chapter to me was the worst one just due to how long and boring it really is this isn't Game Of Thrones it's James Bond we don't need long backstory,s just think of how boring Casino Royale would have been if we spent over an hour just on Bond growing up it would be dull and boring and that's how I felt about this chapter of this book.

I have to say that I didn't really understand what the villain's main objective was and that was something that could have been made a bit more clear since it's a pivotal scene instead what we got was a long winded speech about America and drugs none of which made it any clear what the main goal was and to me that really hurt the story since I was really into it and I couldn't wait to read more so not having a clear end game was really disappointing to me.

There is one positive tho the action scenes I thought were really well written and as I was reading them I started to picture how they would look if this book was to be adapted into a film and I have to say that the action would look really good on the big screen heck there's even a pretty good car chase scene near the end of the book.

Overall this was a really fun read and if you are a fan of James Bond then this is something that you might already own i'm not sure if it's a must read tho I think that will be up to you to decide but I had a good tie reading it despite it's issues so i'll give it a 7 out of 10 and i'm not sure if there will ever be another book review from me since these books are hard to find.