juliarunaway 's review for:

Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell

3.0

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3.5 stars. Cloud Atlas was quite a hard read for me, but, as pretty much all other reviewers said, it is also a very clever book. The structure of the book goes like this: every chapter takes place in a different year and place, follows different characters and is a different kind of narrative; the first chapter is diary excerpts, the next one is told through letters and so on. The language also changes to suit the setting of the story through each part and it even becomes some sort of imagined futuristic English in chapters 5 and 6, which made it a particularly challenging read for me. Chapters 1 through 6 follow a chronological order from past to future, however after the middle chapter, we revisit each story backwards to find out the ending of each story and how they all fit together. While at the beginning each story is linked only by small details, after chapter 6 more links are revealed and the stories fall better in the bigger picture.
A slow read for me, but very clever and a different, imaginative read.