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brenden_odonnell 's review for:
Birnam Wood
by Eleanor Catton
I suppose it’s not fair to take a star away simply because this novel didn’t do what I’d started to hope it would do when I was about 50 pages in: give us the inside of a Musk/Grimes family epic. However, what it did do was pretty extraordinary. It’s a three-part, three-genre suspense. I’ll admit that the first part was by far my favorite. It provided such powerful insights into contemporary human psychological experiences in a way that felt so effortless and endearing. It had seamless free indirect speech inflected with charming, didactic platitudes: Mira could not understand “the difference between running towards something, and running away” (17). Post part one, the book simply got too plotty for me. Nonetheless, absolutely a thrilling read from start to finish.