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A review by shadda
Another Broken Wizard by Colin Dodds
1.0
Firstly, I am not the target audience for this book. The characters hate the sort of person I am and state it throughout the book, which makes it especially hard to empathize with them when their bad decisions lead to bad places. The narrator, Jim, is himself the sort of person that his friends would presume to hate and this causes him some measure of internal conflict, but Jim isn't really a strong enough character to offer counterpoint. The message seems to be that America rewards those who are willing to "go with the system" and that those who rebel ultimately create their own system of failure that they're unable to escape from. Cool, I guess, if the only America is the America of the working class.
Secondly, the author's writing style ultimately fails to engage me. He has plenty of quotable moments, but the connecting bits drag. He also employs a *lot* of anaphora and polysyndeton (literary devices that use repetition of words or phrases for an effect) and while this is likely meant to make a statement about Jim's life and the lives of the people he left behind, my lack of engagement made them seem gimmicky.
Ultimately, this is a very insular feeling novel, and I think that my colleague from Massachusetts would love it. My fellow non-Americans, however, may that insularity a weakness. Much like mid-western Trump supporters, the concerns of this novel deserve to be heard, but do not outweigh the concerns of everything and everyone else in the world, and when the characters seem intent on shooting themselves in the foot, it's hard to sit back and cheer them on.
Secondly, the author's writing style ultimately fails to engage me. He has plenty of quotable moments, but the connecting bits drag. He also employs a *lot* of anaphora and polysyndeton (literary devices that use repetition of words or phrases for an effect) and while this is likely meant to make a statement about Jim's life and the lives of the people he left behind, my lack of engagement made them seem gimmicky.
Ultimately, this is a very insular feeling novel, and I think that my colleague from Massachusetts would love it. My fellow non-Americans, however, may that insularity a weakness. Much like mid-western Trump supporters, the concerns of this novel deserve to be heard, but do not outweigh the concerns of everything and everyone else in the world, and when the characters seem intent on shooting themselves in the foot, it's hard to sit back and cheer them on.