A review by chaseberry
The Listeners by Maggie Stiefvater

3.25

I'm always seated for Maggie so I know she could have done more with this. There are so many shining, glimmering moments littered throughout that do nothing but shade the rest of the novel in a first-draft sort of light. An egregious abandonment of any sense of time passing, which may have been on purpose but was simply executed too poorly to cause anything but harm. Maybe three or four times a character mentions "the weeks since they've arrived" and that's as much as we get. Weeks? I didn't know it had been weeks. More than once a chapter would seem to pick up immediately where the last one had ended until a character would mention the events of the previous chapter having happened weeks ago. I understand the hotel is supposed to evoke a sort of liminal space but the ultimate result was characters who were supposed to have been bonding over months and months feeling like they only interacted over the course of a few days. I was still charmed though! I enjoyed it and would not tell someone it wasn't worth a read