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A review by amongst_the_bookstacks
The Cautious Traveller's Guide to the Wastelands by Sarah Brooks
adventurous
mysterious
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Plot
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? No
2.0
Listen. I wanted to love this book. I tried to love this book. The cover? Gorgeous. The premise? Practically tailor-made for me. A magical train slicing across a nightmarish wasteland, complete with strange creatures, buried secrets, and a ticking sense of doom? Yes please. Inject that directly into my Goodreads TBR.
But instead of gripping tension or spine-tingling weirdness, what I got was a long, meandering wander through one of the slowest moving narratives I’ve encountered in a while. Not “meditative slow.” Not “Piranesi slow.” Just... stalled. Like the train itself had broken down somewhere between narrative momentum and character development, and no one remembered to call the conductor.
There are multiple POVs, and yet somehow every character sounds the same. You could have picked up a line of dialogue, held it up to the light like a literary fingerprint, and still had no clue whose voice it belonged to. Weiwei, Marya, Henry Gray (don’t get me started) - all of them blurred together into a soup of vaguely mournful inner monologues. The idea of a misfit crew bonded by circumstance should sing. This just hummed quietly in the background while I tried to stay awake.
And since we’re here, let’s talk about the Snowpiercer of it all. This book wants to channel that same claustrophobic, class-stratified pressure cooker on rails. But where Snowpiercer barrels forward with sharp stakes and brutal energy, The Cautious Traveller’s Guide sort of lounges in a velvet seat and stares moodily out the window. There’s no urgency, no propulsion. Just a lot of suggestive atmosphere and a disappointing lack of bite. If Snowpiercer is a knife fight in a steel tube, this is tea in a haunted lounge car that never quite gets spooky.
And yes, I know what you're thinking. “But the writing!” Sure. It’s decent. There are moments that almost shimmer, little phrases, haunting images, crumbs of what could’ve been a much sharper book. But decent prose can only carry you so far when you feel like you’re stuck on a train ride with no destination and no one you care about. I didn’t root for a single person. Not one. The Wastelands themselves? Intriguing on paper. On the page, disappointingly underbaked.
I kept hoping the plot would kick in, that something would jolt this story into gear. A big reveal, a betrayal, a monstrous fae-bird snatching someone off the caboose - ANYTHING. But no. There is a “twist,” technically, toward the end. I won’t spoil it, but suffice to say it didn’t feel earned so much as inserted, like someone remembered last-minute that books should probably have climaxes.
2 stars from me, and honestly, most of that is for the concept and the moody, atmospheric groundwork. I can see what Brooks wanted to do. There’s ambition here, and I’m not writing her off as a writer - I’d probably give her next book a shot. But this one? This was a chore. A beautiful, plodding, disappointingly quiet chore.
But instead of gripping tension or spine-tingling weirdness, what I got was a long, meandering wander through one of the slowest moving narratives I’ve encountered in a while. Not “meditative slow.” Not “Piranesi slow.” Just... stalled. Like the train itself had broken down somewhere between narrative momentum and character development, and no one remembered to call the conductor.
There are multiple POVs, and yet somehow every character sounds the same. You could have picked up a line of dialogue, held it up to the light like a literary fingerprint, and still had no clue whose voice it belonged to. Weiwei, Marya, Henry Gray (don’t get me started) - all of them blurred together into a soup of vaguely mournful inner monologues. The idea of a misfit crew bonded by circumstance should sing. This just hummed quietly in the background while I tried to stay awake.
And since we’re here, let’s talk about the Snowpiercer of it all. This book wants to channel that same claustrophobic, class-stratified pressure cooker on rails. But where Snowpiercer barrels forward with sharp stakes and brutal energy, The Cautious Traveller’s Guide sort of lounges in a velvet seat and stares moodily out the window. There’s no urgency, no propulsion. Just a lot of suggestive atmosphere and a disappointing lack of bite. If Snowpiercer is a knife fight in a steel tube, this is tea in a haunted lounge car that never quite gets spooky.
And yes, I know what you're thinking. “But the writing!” Sure. It’s decent. There are moments that almost shimmer, little phrases, haunting images, crumbs of what could’ve been a much sharper book. But decent prose can only carry you so far when you feel like you’re stuck on a train ride with no destination and no one you care about. I didn’t root for a single person. Not one. The Wastelands themselves? Intriguing on paper. On the page, disappointingly underbaked.
I kept hoping the plot would kick in, that something would jolt this story into gear. A big reveal, a betrayal, a monstrous fae-bird snatching someone off the caboose - ANYTHING. But no. There is a “twist,” technically, toward the end. I won’t spoil it, but suffice to say it didn’t feel earned so much as inserted, like someone remembered last-minute that books should probably have climaxes.
2 stars from me, and honestly, most of that is for the concept and the moody, atmospheric groundwork. I can see what Brooks wanted to do. There’s ambition here, and I’m not writing her off as a writer - I’d probably give her next book a shot. But this one? This was a chore. A beautiful, plodding, disappointingly quiet chore.