Thunderstruck by Erik Larson is a novel that follows the lives of two people. One of these people is a man named Guglielmo Marconi, the inventor of the wireless. The story beautifully narrates the trials and mishaps that happen when testing and improving his technology. It even gives perspective of his competitors also trying to implement the technology into their inventions. Meanwhile a low-profile murderer named Hawley Crippen struggles to deal with a failing marriage. Crippen’s wife is constantly nagging until he finally snaps and tries to murder her. Both men are seemingly unrelated to each other until Crippen boards a ship equipped with Marconi’s wireless technology which is used to track the wanted man as he flees from the country. Personally, I thought the book was slow in most parts but the parts that weren't were gripping and very well written. A good example of this comes in my favorite character, Mr. Hawley Crippen. One thing about this character is that although he ends up killing his wife, I could feel myself sympathizing with him as his wife got more and more irritating until I found myself wondering, “What is going to happen to her?”. It is very easy to see why this is, because Marconi’s life seems very boring and drones on and on. However, it was very exciting when he finally figured out how to harness the power of the…show more content… I wound up confused during the scientific explanations and bored during the dialogue. The latter of which, is very interesting in that it sounds like language that would really be used in the early 1900’s. While this makes it easy to put yourself in the shoes of the characters and feel immersed, the downside is that it makes a lot of passages hard to follow, especially for a high schooler. The characters on the other hand were very easy to sympathise with, although with the introduction of so many at the beginning, I had a little trouble remembering who was who and did
