A review by annaclaire18
The Life of Elves by Muriel Barbery

challenging emotional mysterious sad slow-paced

• Strong character development? No
• Loveable characters? No
• Diverse cast of characters? No
• Flaws of characters a main focus? No

2.5

This book was… confusing. There were moments of brilliant, beautiful prose that deeply moved me and compelled me to keep reading, but most of the time my face looked like this: 🤨. The plot was so dense and abstract, the characters so varied, that I never at any point understood what was going on. While I did genuinely enjoy Barbery’s poetic descriptions of life, love, and the natural world, I found at the end that I had not enjoyed the novel as a story, so caught up was I in just trying to figure out what the hell was going on.