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A review by mifterkim
The Absolute Book by Elizabeth Knox
3.0
This book was certainly a thing that I now have read!
I don't regret reading it and there were parts I really liked, but I'm still not sure what was going on.
It is about books (which I'm a sucker for) and the Fae (also one of my favourite subjects) but it's also about grief, and murder, and contract killing, and whether contract killing is worse than murder, and gods (lots of them) and magic and the police and government and celebrity and incarceration and memory and sisterhood and ultimately environmentalism. And lots more. That is too many themes!
The tone and plot is also all over the place. It's a book that wears its influences on its sleeve, both those explicitly mentioned (the Da Vinci Code, Kate Mosse's Labyrinth) and those alluded to but not named for unknown reasons (The Lord of the Rings films, Game of Thrones). The tone of the book veers wildly between these types of books - it's a thriller and a mystery, then a fairy tale, with fantasy action peppered in, and some extremely harrowing kidnapping and violence thrown in as well. There are so many other influences and plot threads as well. So many. The book I would most compare it to is Neil Gaiman's American Gods, which is also an obvious but unstated influence.
The book starts really slowly, lasts a long time and then goes at absolute breakneck speed to catch up with itself at the end.
There were a lot of pieces of plot that I thought were going nowhere until the last few pages of the book, at which point everything gets resolved extremely rapidly with little satisfaction for the reader. Although there is a little piece of revelatory backstory that gets introduced, for the first time, near the very end and is never mentioned again.
There really are some lovely scenes and descriptions and a lot of it was enjoyable to read, but it was so scattered and unfocussed that I just could not like it. Also, there are some truly interminable sequences near the beginning about a book tour. The book tour, and how good the main character's book is, did not need to be in there. The time spent on that, and some other mundanities near the beginning, compared to the very little time spent wrapping up the actual plot, is very strange.
I can't honestly recommend this book but if, like me, you tend to read any book about books, you will probably read it anyway. You might not be wasting your time? I'm really still not sure.
I don't regret reading it and there were parts I really liked, but I'm still not sure what was going on.
It is about books (which I'm a sucker for) and the Fae (also one of my favourite subjects) but it's also about grief, and murder, and contract killing, and whether contract killing is worse than murder, and gods (lots of them) and magic and the police and government and celebrity and incarceration and memory and sisterhood and ultimately environmentalism. And lots more. That is too many themes!
The tone and plot is also all over the place. It's a book that wears its influences on its sleeve, both those explicitly mentioned (the Da Vinci Code, Kate Mosse's Labyrinth) and those alluded to but not named for unknown reasons (The Lord of the Rings films, Game of Thrones). The tone of the book veers wildly between these types of books - it's a thriller and a mystery, then a fairy tale, with fantasy action peppered in, and some extremely harrowing kidnapping and violence thrown in as well. There are so many other influences and plot threads as well. So many. The book I would most compare it to is Neil Gaiman's American Gods, which is also an obvious but unstated influence.
The book starts really slowly, lasts a long time and then goes at absolute breakneck speed to catch up with itself at the end.
There were a lot of pieces of plot that I thought were going nowhere until the last few pages of the book, at which point everything gets resolved extremely rapidly with little satisfaction for the reader. Although there is a little piece of revelatory backstory that gets introduced, for the first time, near the very end and is never mentioned again.
There really are some lovely scenes and descriptions and a lot of it was enjoyable to read, but it was so scattered and unfocussed that I just could not like it. Also, there are some truly interminable sequences near the beginning about a book tour. The book tour, and how good the main character's book is, did not need to be in there. The time spent on that, and some other mundanities near the beginning, compared to the very little time spent wrapping up the actual plot, is very strange.
I can't honestly recommend this book but if, like me, you tend to read any book about books, you will probably read it anyway. You might not be wasting your time? I'm really still not sure.