eveningreverie 's review for:

The Immortal King Rao by Vauhini Vara

3.25

reflective sad slow-paced

Plot or Character Driven: A mix

Strong character development: Complicated

Loveable characters: No

Diverse cast of characters: Yes

Flaws of characters a main focus: Yes

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Really cool premise with lacking execution. Temporally-fragmented narrative seemed purposeless besides a couple of rather unnecessary twists. A sense of time that at times stretches indomitably long and at times condenses such vast swaths of time into a footnote. A lot of the time, I didn’t care for a few of the simultaneous stories. I get what they’re doing in the context of the narrative (I.e.

I get it, she has a clarinet, maybe these are a real-time representation of her dad’s tangential thoughts

), but more often than not it feels fundamentally disconnected from itself. There’s little here that couldn’t have been successfully (or more so) told chronologically.