Reviews

The Vanished Birds by Simon Jimenez

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drewmirque's review against another edition

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challenging inspiring mysterious slow-paced

2.5

hartmancb's review against another edition

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slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? Yes

2.5

Lots of superfluous run on sentences. Very hard to distinguish which characters are which and what plot points are important with lots of jumping around and switching viewpoints with little orientation to whose viewpoint. Confusing timeline that isn’t quite clear. I felt no connection to the characters and only finished it because it’s for a book club. I didn’t understand the point of the plot, there’s poor character development and sometimes none, and there isn’t much for world building.

kuporeads's review against another edition

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dark emotional reflective

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

Content Warnings

bookph1le's review against another edition

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3.0

3.5 stars

This was an absolute beast of a novel. I almost gave up on it before I finally got pulled in, and though I thought there were some glimmers of something really lovely and worth reading, there were two big downsides that tempered my enjoyment:

1. The beginning of the book is flat-out boring and unnecessary. Some parts of it do have relevance to the greater story, but all of Kaeda's tale could have been condensed into a few pages, thus doing the novel a service. I couldn't for the life of me figure out why what read like a synopsis of some random guy's life was given so much page space.

2. This book is much more flowery than it needs to be, to the extent that it slows the pace and drags down the narrative. This is one of those books that has lots and lots of words, many of which don't need to be there and are only there because they might strike some as pretty. That's fine, and if you enjoy long, poetic descriptions where something more succinct would suffice, then that's what you should get. Unfortunately, for someone like me who tends to get impatient with lots of flowery prose, this ended up tilting the novel toward the sort of book that isn't to my tastes.

And these two major gripes of mine are what ultimately prevented me from enjoying the novel as much as I might have liked, despite my interest in the world building and the interesting pearl of a suspenseful plot involving technology run amok. This was a marathon of a book, one where the closer I got to finding out the answers to the questions that had initially spurred me on, the farther away the end seemed to grow until, ultimately, I limped over the finish line, more glad that it was over than that I had taken the journey.