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challenging
emotional
reflective
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
I find this book challenging and hard to explain my feelings towards. The themes are very obvious, and feel underbaked for most of its length. I hated pretty much every character and was very dissapointed with the cynicism for the first half of the book. But somewhere around ~350 pages, the characters turn and with them, so did my enjoyment. Narratively, this seems to be the point where the characters finally accept their true natures and the parts of themselves that they have the freedom to change (I see what you did there, Franzen). It doesn't escape me that this is around the point where I also accepted that I wasn't going to suddenly get the character development that I wanted to smack the characters into accepting, or start enjoying the narrative. Maybe that was the point all along.
I saw a quote from another reviewer/critic of this work that claimed that they liked the book without enjoying it. I kind of feel the reverse - I enjoyed the book without ever liking anything about it.
I saw a quote from another reviewer/critic of this work that claimed that they liked the book without enjoying it. I kind of feel the reverse - I enjoyed the book without ever liking anything about it.