27th June 2020

I picked this book up at a discount outlet purely on the basis of the cover - I’d not heard of it nor the author before, but the blurb sounded fascinating.

Sadly I didn’t manage to get anywhere with the story. The novel opens with no sense of introduction to the universe it’s set in - throwing the reader headlong into told exposition, which felt a bit like a lecture and thus not a way that I’m good at learning things. Each chapter then repeated the same from a different character in a different setting, until the point that I gave up - unable to follow or take an interest.

I felt that I would have appreciated a softer introduction - the typical introduction to the world through a character who is learning about it for the first time, which the great worldbuilding authors do, seems to work really well for me.

So after about fifty pages, I returned the book to my shelf and moved on to find something I could better engage with and would bring me more enjoyment from reading.

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