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3.69 AVERAGE
3.69 AVERAGE
adventurous
emotional
hopeful
reflective
sad
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
This book took my heart apart into a million different pieces and then put it back together again.
Like the cover art, the descriptions in this book evoke a vast landscape of imagination. I became happily lost in the depictions of places and characters' inner workings. However, I also got lost in the maze of characters, finding it difficult to remember who was whom and their relation to the overall plot. For this reason, I did not feel any real sense of connection to the characters.
adventurous
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Complicated
emotional
reflective
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Complicated
I really enjoyed Porter's writing and round each chapter as a standalone very enjoyable, but as a whole and especially as an audiobook I found the sprawling cast of characters way to hard to keep track of and found myself a little annoyed that the author was audacious enough to expect so much work from her readers. I needed a visual map of the family tree and I would have been good to go.
adventurous
challenging
dark
emotional
inspiring
mysterious
reflective
sad
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Complicated
A decent multi generational family tale that had a rather tangled way of coming together. I question the use of choosing second or first person perspectives intermediately. While I also enjoyed many of the characters, I didn't always connect with all of them as the movement among them and the time frames felt a bit disjointed. I enjoyed it, there was fantastic narration but as a person who enjoyed the play that is so integral to part of the family's story, I'm not really certain there was a true need for that devise. Someone's coping mechanism could have been any sort of distracting obsession. I kept waiting for some great parallel. Unless that parallel is that we are all just swimming blindly, well I suppose that could be it. but for a reader who had never heard of it, I wonder if it would have just felt too arbitrary.
All the same, I enjoyed this book, but not quite as much as I had anticipated.
All the same, I enjoyed this book, but not quite as much as I had anticipated.
inspiring
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
challenging
emotional
reflective
medium-paced
This is a sprawling mosaic of a book with fascinating and engaging and conflicted and very real characters that spans generations and friendships and family and good days and bad days and dark times and better ones. Although the beginning of the book and its very clinical tone initially turned me off, I'm glad I kept reading. As the stories of the many characters got underway, the writing became more intimate and interesting.
challenging
emotional
mysterious
reflective
sad
tense
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes