A review by jessmanners
Atmospheric Disturbances by Rivka Galchen

3.0

I don't know! There were moments, especially at the beginning, when I was really charmed by how quirky and bizarre this is, but for the most part, I vacillated between feeling too stupid and too impatient. I think I wanted this to be a story of a person who seemed crazy but ultimately wasn't, but..unless my problem is that I'm too stupid for this book, which is entirely possible (or that it doesn't lend itself well to being heard rather than read--another definite possibility), it just turned out that the person who seemed obviously crazy was obviously crazy, and was forcing everyone else to navigate the world around him and his delusions, which I guess is interesting on some level, but wasn't enough to sustain me for an entire novel.
I think I would have loved this book if I had read it 10 or 15 years ago, but...