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gracechen64's review against another edition
5.0
So good that I don't even know where to begin to say how good it is. He reaches into your heart and gently touches it like a little girl petting her hamster: she's gentle, but sometimes gets a little excited and accidentally hurts it. You feel the touch, the tickle, the pain, the intimacy and the distance. Have to read it again to understand more the prologue.
booksadaisyes's review against another edition
4.0
This is a beautifully written book...which draws you in from the beginning but then you start to wonder where is this story going...and I even contemplated not continuing...but then in one page this book takes a dramatic and totally unexpected turn...I loved this book.
mellm's review against another edition
4.0
4.5 I have yet to read anything by Van Booy that failed to awe me with its language. Van Booy's writing is immensely lyrical, and his imagery never fails to strike my sense and then stay with me long after my reading is finished.
abbeyhar103's review against another edition
2.0
This book had some nice flashes of beautiful description or exquisitely written sentences but overall: barf. A totally schlocky story. Disappointing. Made me want to go to Athens though.
modern_analog's review against another edition
3.0
I'd really like to give this book 3.5 stars, as I did enjoy it, it just took me awhile to get into it. Read it before you take a trip to Europe, or on the flight there. It has exotic locales, thoughtful language, love, and tragedy.
emvaughters's review against another edition
2.0
This book had potential and it made me want to finish it to find out what happened, but it really fell flat.
teddien's review against another edition
4.0
Beautifully written- I was surprised at the eventual direction the book took but it gave everything more heft and was much more powerful than I expected (especially with the shift in narration throughout).
ejbkimbler's review against another edition
2.0
*I got this book as an ARC from Goodreads FirstReads*
This book took me a little while to get into. The writing style actually changes part way into the book, which is a little strange, but the portion after the change was much easier for me to read. The writing at the beginning is beautiful- full of images that are both beautiful and unique. However, those images actually took me out of the story and seemed to slow down the pace of the book. I could tell when Simon Van Booy really started to get into the lives of his characters because the plot suddenly seemed to matter more than the pretty images- finally the book was going somewhere!
And then Rebecca, the girl who seems to be the main character, dies. And that was only halfway through the novel. Talk about throwing the reader for a loop...
There are 4 "books" and an epilogue- which you don't discover until you reach the end of book one... halfway through the novel. And each "book" is shorter than the previous one. This wouldn't bug me so much except that I got used to book one, where Rebecca was the main character and everything was written in 3rd person narrative. Book two switches to 2nd person narrative as Henry, who is about as depressed as can be after he and George find Rebecca dead. There's even a chunk of book two that isn't narrative at all- it's images of letters Henry sends to George. Book three continues in 2nd person narrative. In book four, Henry has finally recovered, several years later, from his misery, which is a relief partly because being in Henry's head was exhausting and because we're finally back to 3rd person narration. I guess I just felt like the format wasn't consistent enough- every change reminded me that I was reading a book, not experiencing a story.
Overall, I thought the book was okay. Not a book I'm likely to pick up and read again though.
This book took me a little while to get into. The writing style actually changes part way into the book, which is a little strange, but the portion after the change was much easier for me to read. The writing at the beginning is beautiful- full of images that are both beautiful and unique. However, those images actually took me out of the story and seemed to slow down the pace of the book. I could tell when Simon Van Booy really started to get into the lives of his characters because the plot suddenly seemed to matter more than the pretty images- finally the book was going somewhere!
And then Rebecca, the girl who seems to be the main character, dies. And that was only halfway through the novel. Talk about throwing the reader for a loop...
There are 4 "books" and an epilogue- which you don't discover until you reach the end of book one... halfway through the novel. And each "book" is shorter than the previous one. This wouldn't bug me so much except that I got used to book one, where Rebecca was the main character and everything was written in 3rd person narrative. Book two switches to 2nd person narrative as Henry, who is about as depressed as can be after he and George find Rebecca dead. There's even a chunk of book two that isn't narrative at all- it's images of letters Henry sends to George. Book three continues in 2nd person narrative. In book four, Henry has finally recovered, several years later, from his misery, which is a relief partly because being in Henry's head was exhausting and because we're finally back to 3rd person narration. I guess I just felt like the format wasn't consistent enough- every change reminded me that I was reading a book, not experiencing a story.
Overall, I thought the book was okay. Not a book I'm likely to pick up and read again though.