Seriously, we don't mind that Brown's own professorial James Bond, Professor Robert Langdon always manages to find himself repeatedly in the same situation.........racing around Europe to uncover a world-shattering mystery........always staying one step ahead of either the cops, the villains or a variety of both........and invariably doing all this while accompanied by a hubba-hubba hot woman.......
We don't mind that at no point in these books does Langdon ever catch his breath for a moment of self-awareness and shout out, "Why the hell does this shit always happen to me??"
To trot out our usual analogy.......hey, it's a book version of a Burger King Double Whopper.......sure, it's junk food, but it's oh so tasty and it's guilty pleasure fun every time you chomp down on it.
And like millions of other satisfied customers, we're more than willing to forgive Dan Brown for his clunky prose.......we're all too busy being dazzled by the staggering amount of fascinating research he pours into these books.
Personally, if we hit Google for info more than 3 times a day, we're ready for a nap......so we can't help feeling humbled as Brown's encyclopedic tsunami of Ripley's Believe It Or Not facts washes over us.....
Our only qualm about this one......a uneasy suspicion that Brown's running out of Big Ideas to send Robert Langdon out on another breathless quest.....
The earth-shaking Reveal here.......where mankind came from and what we'll evolve into, has already been exhaustively covered by countless science fiction novels and films.....
And as for Brown's Super-Dooper Jumbo Extra Twist in the final pages..........in the interest of fairness to the book's future readers, we won't even drop a slight hint as to which iconic movie he heavily borrowed it from.......
We still had a rippin' good time with "Origin", racing through the pages to see what happens next......and that's why you pick up a big fat best seller in the first place.......to gobble it up faster than a Double Whopper. No belching required afterwards either........3 stars (***)....
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