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A review by greeniezona
The Familiar, Volume 2: Into the Forest by Mark Z. Danielewski
4.0
I have come to the inevitable conclusion that I am going to have to check the rest of these books out at the library. I mean really, Mark, I love to support authors and all that, but by the time this experiment is over it would take an entire bookcase to house these books. Who has that kind of shelf-space/floor-space/money/commitment?
But I did buy this one, and plowed through it in a single day during Dewey's readathon. That kind of concentrated reading really helped with the dialects, etc., but could obviously not be sustained over the entire series, which remains my main complaint about this book. You cannot binge-read these, and with a cast of thousands (slight hyperbole, but only slight), several conspiracy theories, thick dialects, etc., these books are a lot to unpack each time. Clearly I need to make some sort of cheat sheet to follow along, but when each book is 800-900ish pages, how do you scan through to find the clues to what you've missed? UGH.
But there is still Xanther, who I still love, and the word art in her sections somehow continues to make it all worth it. Still her for Anwar and Astair as well, though parts of Astair's sections were a little overwhelming this time. Also, I'm starting to get a handle on Cas's story, which I couldn't say in the first volume.
One disclaimer: THIS BOOK CONTAINS ONE ACT OF PURE, IRREDEEMABLE EVIL, AND IF SOMEONE DOESN'T PUT THE MAYOR'S HEAD ON A PIKE BEFORE THE END OF THIS SERIES I WILL BE VERY DISAPPOINTED.
But I did buy this one, and plowed through it in a single day during Dewey's readathon. That kind of concentrated reading really helped with the dialects, etc., but could obviously not be sustained over the entire series, which remains my main complaint about this book. You cannot binge-read these, and with a cast of thousands (slight hyperbole, but only slight), several conspiracy theories, thick dialects, etc., these books are a lot to unpack each time. Clearly I need to make some sort of cheat sheet to follow along, but when each book is 800-900ish pages, how do you scan through to find the clues to what you've missed? UGH.
But there is still Xanther, who I still love, and the word art in her sections somehow continues to make it all worth it. Still her for Anwar and Astair as well, though parts of Astair's sections were a little overwhelming this time. Also, I'm starting to get a handle on Cas's story, which I couldn't say in the first volume.
One disclaimer: THIS BOOK CONTAINS ONE ACT OF PURE, IRREDEEMABLE EVIL, AND IF SOMEONE DOESN'T PUT THE MAYOR'S HEAD ON A PIKE BEFORE THE END OF THIS SERIES I WILL BE VERY DISAPPOINTED.