16.08.12
Some people praise the magical, escapist setting. Some people comment on the unusual plot. Well, yes, these are certainly plus points but all I could think, as I ploughed through 500 pages of two-dimensional characters doing confusing things in evocative surroundings, was that it would be half the length without those endless adjectives and adverbs cluttering up the prose. Lovely cover, though, and a great marketing campaign (which encouraged me to get it out of the library in the first place).
It's also rather a shameless rip-off of Punchdrunk's immersion theatre techniques, which the writer does admit to in an end note... It works better as theatre than prose though the second production of theirs that I saw was a bit like this book, all style and no substance.
ReplyDeleteOh, that's interesting. It's like original YouTube videos that get ripped off by being copied as corporate adverts - most people didn't know it's been original already. This book seems popular because of its "magical" setting but I just thought it was badly written (and under-edited).
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