“Didnât make it. Didnât have the spirit to push through.
It started strong for me, but at some point we jump 100 years into the future and have a brand new set of at least a dozen different characters.
I recognize that there are people out there for whom a long list of characters isnât a problem. Iâve met a number of people who enjoy reading long Russian novels that almost require a character list, flipcharts, and family trees.
Having a large number of characters isnât necessarily bad, but I feel pretty strongly that if a character is necessary to the story, I should know enough about him or her to remember who he or she is. It really takes me out of the story when I have to say, Okay, which one is that again? over and over.
There were some really well drawn characters in the book, but most of those appeared in the first section. There were some good ones that appeared later as well, but they were surrounded by a bunch of nobodies. I think at one point a tertiary character killed his own brother, which is supposed to be fairly emotional, but Iâm still not entirely sure thatâs what happened. Maybe I should have led that with âSpoiler Alert,â but how can it be a spoiler if it may not have even happened?
This book was very different from the sorts of things I normally enjoy. The opposite of this book would be something like the Sisters Brothers, a book that really has 2 big characters. I couldnât tell you their names, but I could tell you just about everything else about them. Or maybe a more apt comparison is World War Z. The characters donât sound as different on the page as one might expect, but they do present very different perspectives on the same events, and the story doesnât use a complicated relationship web to hold the narrative together.
Maybe itâs a name thing. I wonder if people who are really good with names have a knack for this kind of thing.
Regardless, I got to a section where all these characters, who I didnât know, were having foreshadowing dreams, which I didnât care about, and there was still a good 300 pages to go. Also of note, I was on an airplane when I hit the wall. So it was finish this or nothing, and I took nothing.
“
Menu