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A review by saracat
Inland by Téa Obreht
3.0
The book shifts between telling about one set of characters and events told in first person and another set of characters and events told in third person. I am still not sure how I feel about the writing style and word choses for the novel. The author would drop in words that were not English and only some of the time was their enough context clues to let you begin to guess their meaning. I'm not one to use a dictionary while reading and have always taken the approach of trying to glean what you can of the meaning of words you don't know, but even by the books end, there were words I would have to take the time to look up. The frequency and moments the author used such words felt natural to the story and I do think that if the author had outright defined the words it would have broken the flow of the story. Though, I do wish that there had been some more creative attempt to at least over time give a bit more feel for what the words might mean.
One more note about language of the book. While I've never researched into how people might have spoken during that time period, the book did not read like modern English as used and spoken in the US, so it did have the feeling when reading the book that you were not in the present.
As for the story and the characters, it was interesting and by the end I was wanting to know and understand what happened and how everything connected together. However, it took quite a while for me to get there. I'm not sure I would have pressed on had this book not been for my bookclub. There definitely is depth and complexity to each character. The way in which the author tried to wrap things up in the final few pages was quite unsatisfying to me. I like the idea of how the author tried to end things. But I don't really like the execution of it.
One more note about language of the book. While I've never researched into how people might have spoken during that time period, the book did not read like modern English as used and spoken in the US, so it did have the feeling when reading the book that you were not in the present.
As for the story and the characters, it was interesting and by the end I was wanting to know and understand what happened and how everything connected together. However, it took quite a while for me to get there. I'm not sure I would have pressed on had this book not been for my bookclub. There definitely is depth and complexity to each character. The way in which the author tried to wrap things up in the final few pages was quite unsatisfying to me. I like the idea of how the author tried to end things. But I don't really like the execution of it.