Really enjoyed this! Hadn’t heard anything about it but picked it up at my local bookshop while browsing, and glad I did. Multiple storylines, but cohReally enjoyed this! Hadn’t heard anything about it but picked it up at my local bookshop while browsing, and glad I did. Multiple storylines, but cohesive and well done. Recommend! ...more
This was intriguing, and kept me turning the pages. I really liked the characters, and the building of the story. The emotional pull, the secret slowlThis was intriguing, and kept me turning the pages. I really liked the characters, and the building of the story. The emotional pull, the secret slowly being revealed, the reality of how messy real love is, and how easily life can get very complicated…. It was all rolled up in this story and made for super great reading! ...more
Other reviewers have used words like epic, haunting, and ambitious to describe this book and I can agree with all of them. However, emphasis on hauntiOther reviewers have used words like epic, haunting, and ambitious to describe this book and I can agree with all of them. However, emphasis on haunting, as in this book is centered around a deadly plague and how the world handles it. Epic in that it encompasses a span of millennia, and dozens and dozens of characters. Ambitious in that it starts at where we think the beginning is and takes us all the way past that to the not so near future where we learn that beginning was really somewhere past the middle. This is a poor summarization admittedly because I find I can’t slot this story properly into a any one type of story. The writing and world building and densely populated cast of characters are all well done. The issue for me was in keeping up with who was who, when the character changed, where they were in the timeline of the story, and was this a second or third installment of a previous characters story or was this an entirely new one. Some characters were never named, and some had ties to other characters that you don’t realize until that one tiny detail in their bit of the story connects to that other tiny detail in another characters but. One thing I highly recommend is having a little notepad to jot down names and brief details for each part because I was constantly wondering how a character fit in and if I was missing a connection. I do not typically have a problem keeping up with multiple characters but I really struggled keeping up in this story. Overall, many will love this book, but I really found it so depressing and sad and morbid that it overwhelmed any enjoyment I may have gotten from reading it. However I will say this author is a serious genius to keep all this together and create a legible unique story and I won’t hesitate to read another work of theirs. ...more