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A review by annasirius
The Ill-Made Mute by Cecilia Dart-Thornton
2.0
2.5
I wanted to like this book due to the beautiful descriptions, yet I quickly started to skim over these in the vain attempt to find the story.
This is a novel centred around learning more about the protagonist's identity, and it is a story that assumes that the readers sticks with it because they are intrigued enough by this quest and empathetic enough towards the main character. However, because the protagonist is so featureless for a long time and literally everyone around them is hard-hearted, I neither cared for the main character nor developed an interest in the world, no matter how many words are beautifully (and sometimes excessively) strung together to describe it.
I believe my main problem is that the story was told from a third person perspective that gave us occasional glimpses into the main character's thoughts and feelings but always remained rather distant. Since the protagonist already knows so little about the world and the reader is rarely told more than the protagonist knows, why not at least let us intimately connect with their personal thoughts & feelings? This would also have created a three-dimensional character, rather than this sketch of a suffering, ill-treated person. The problem is in the title: 'The ill-made mute'. Really?
I wanted to like this book due to the beautiful descriptions, yet I quickly started to skim over these in the vain attempt to find the story.
This is a novel centred around learning more about the protagonist's identity, and it is a story that assumes that the readers sticks with it because they are intrigued enough by this quest and empathetic enough towards the main character. However, because the protagonist is so featureless for a long time and literally everyone around them is hard-hearted, I neither cared for the main character nor developed an interest in the world, no matter how many words are beautifully (and sometimes excessively) strung together to describe it.
I believe my main problem is that the story was told from a third person perspective that gave us occasional glimpses into the main character's thoughts and feelings but always remained rather distant. Since the protagonist already knows so little about the world and the reader is rarely told more than the protagonist knows, why not at least let us intimately connect with their personal thoughts & feelings? This would also have created a three-dimensional character, rather than this sketch of a suffering, ill-treated person. The problem is in the title: 'The ill-made mute'. Really?