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A review by katmarhan
Queen City Jazz by Kathleen Ann Goonan
adventurous
challenging
emotional
reflective
tense
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
3.25
6.5/10
I feel like this is a book that couldn’t quite decide what kind of story it wanted to tell—a young girl’s coming of age, or maybe a quest to save a city, or a treatise on the nature of consciousness, or a story of conflicting world visions, or a dystopian tale of nanotech run amok, or maybe a love story—and just what is love, or perhaps a perspective on our attitudes toward death… You get the idea—the plot was just being pulled in too many directions, as if the author had all these fantastic ideas and rather than pare them down to a manageable few, she tried to weave them all into a rather unwieldy story that suffered from uneven pacing and tone.
Yet the characters were interesting, even as they sometimes metamorphosed into other characters, and the world-building was well done. The reader was fully immersed in Shaker Hill, Dayton, the voyage to Cincinnati, and the Queen City itself, in all its weirdness. Along the way, I learned a lot about bees and, while not a jazz aficionado, I could appreciate the importance of music and dance as a means of emotional expression and communication with others.
I feel like this is a book that couldn’t quite decide what kind of story it wanted to tell—a young girl’s coming of age, or maybe a quest to save a city, or a treatise on the nature of consciousness, or a story of conflicting world visions, or a dystopian tale of nanotech run amok, or maybe a love story—and just what is love, or perhaps a perspective on our attitudes toward death… You get the idea—the plot was just being pulled in too many directions, as if the author had all these fantastic ideas and rather than pare them down to a manageable few, she tried to weave them all into a rather unwieldy story that suffered from uneven pacing and tone.
Yet the characters were interesting, even as they sometimes metamorphosed into other characters, and the world-building was well done. The reader was fully immersed in Shaker Hill, Dayton, the voyage to Cincinnati, and the Queen City itself, in all its weirdness. Along the way, I learned a lot about bees and, while not a jazz aficionado, I could appreciate the importance of music and dance as a means of emotional expression and communication with others.