You need to sign in or sign up before continuing.
Take a photo of a barcode or cover
A review by robinwalter
The Man Who Didn't Fly by Margot Bennett
mysterious
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? N/A
- Strong character development? N/A
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
3.0
The biggest mystery about this book was reconciling the record at The Storygraph, which said I only took 3 days to get through it, with my personal perception of the time taken - 3 geological epochs.
The book was incredibly dense and glacially slow. Some truly remarkable writing - deft, highly polished turns of phrase that made sure the book was read slowly enough to find them, but the overall experience was tedious in the extreme.
I stuck it out because the novelty of the mystery setup was truly fascinating. The idea of trying to establish who was "The Man Who Didn't Fly" was intriguing, but in the end it turned out to be like a 10,000 piece jigsaw puzzle of which 500 actually formed the picture. The rest were excruciatingly detailed depictions of adolescent agonising and oddly self-important and utterly self-obsessed characters whose interactions were so disjointed they numbed any ability to maintain a grasp of the fact that the story WAS about solving a puzzle.
The book was incredibly dense and glacially slow. Some truly remarkable writing - deft, highly polished turns of phrase that made sure the book was read slowly enough to find them, but the overall experience was tedious in the extreme.
I stuck it out because the novelty of the mystery setup was truly fascinating. The idea of trying to establish who was "The Man Who Didn't Fly" was intriguing, but in the end it turned out to be like a 10,000 piece jigsaw puzzle of which 500 actually formed the picture. The rest were excruciatingly detailed depictions of adolescent agonising and oddly self-important and utterly self-obsessed characters whose interactions were so disjointed they numbed any ability to maintain a grasp of the fact that the story WAS about solving a puzzle.