(Reviewed by Christopher J. Lynch)
Lee Matthew Goldberg’s, The Desire Card, is the kind of book that can put a strain on your relationship. That’s right, it’s that “pull-you-right-in, page-turner” type of book that can evoke the ire of your significant other when you can’t seem to put it down.
Goldberg is a great storyteller with a flair for taking a great premise and painting a compelling picture filled with plenty of plot twists, well-drawn characters, great descriptions, and interesting locations from the power halls of New York’s big investment banking firms, to the slums of India where mere survival is a luxury few can afford.
Many authors are able to pull off the task of taking a single unsympathetic main character and getting us to care about him, but The Desire Card is filled with characters in various degrees of failings and we end up caring about what happens to most, if not all of them. One of the things I most liked about this is that Goldberg is able to engender our empathy without resorting to the tired – and obvious – trick of having a single powerful redeeming trait in his otherwise unlikable characters. You would have to look really hard to find any reasons to care about them, but you’re too busy turning the pages to worry about it.
I also enjoyed his use of all of the five senses in describing his scenes. This lends itself to not only bringing the reader into the setting, but also furthers our appreciation for what the character is experiencing themselves.
My only criticism of this work is what I felt was the overuse of the main character’s physical ailments throughout the story. At times, it seemed as though his debilitations were so pronounced and intense, that he was going to drop dead in front of us, yet he never did.
All in all, a great piece of work that will keep you interested and engaged from the very first page to the last.
