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janyriy 's review for:
Welcome to Night Vale
by Jeffrey Cranor, Joseph Fink
3.0 ⭐️
[EDIT: I realise this review sounds a lot more negative than I wanted it to, I had a bad day when I wrote it. If you like WtNV I'd still recommend picking it up, I just personally couldn't really get into it.]
I was a big fan of Welcome To Nightvale when it came out, and as a podcast the weirdness works wonderfully. As a book, unfortunately, not so much. You can definitely tell that the authors are used to writing podcasts, rather than novels. The plot could be described as 'this could have been an email' and the characters felt more like concepts than actual people. I found this happens a lot with books that go for 'Vibes' with a capital V, and it didn't bother me as much here, but I still couldn't really connect to either of the two.
I did like the weirdness, I have ten years ago and I still do, but a story needs stakes and tension. And if you can explain away every plot hole or strange thing that happens with 'oh, that's just how Night Vale is' then it just becomes background noise.
The book is alright. I liked it. It had some pearls of wisdom and it's very different from the books I've picked up recently. I just couldn't get that invested.
[EDIT: I realise this review sounds a lot more negative than I wanted it to, I had a bad day when I wrote it. If you like WtNV I'd still recommend picking it up, I just personally couldn't really get into it.]
I was a big fan of Welcome To Nightvale when it came out, and as a podcast the weirdness works wonderfully. As a book, unfortunately, not so much. You can definitely tell that the authors are used to writing podcasts, rather than novels. The plot could be described as 'this could have been an email' and the characters felt more like concepts than actual people. I found this happens a lot with books that go for 'Vibes' with a capital V, and it didn't bother me as much here, but I still couldn't really connect to either of the two.
I did like the weirdness, I have ten years ago and I still do, but a story needs stakes and tension. And if you can explain away every plot hole or strange thing that happens with 'oh, that's just how Night Vale is' then it just becomes background noise.
The book is alright. I liked it. It had some pearls of wisdom and it's very different from the books I've picked up recently. I just couldn't get that invested.