A short and to the point review, for a couple reasons.
One, it’s the end of the year, and thus time for a flurry of review posting. I don’t have time for in depth.
And two, more importantly, after finishing this book, I felt the need to sit down with someone and have them take me by the hand and explain the book to me bit by bit. I’m giving this the good old five stars because of how enthralled I was while reading it. This is one of those books where either you take your time with it in order to savor it, or you read non-stop until you finish, and it was definitely the latter for me. I still slightly feel as if I didn’t quite get it all, and that’s annoying, and I was seized upon finishing with a definite impulse to go immediately back in and (gently) go at the book with some kind of a metaphorical pickaxe or maybe a chainsaw and knock all its secrets loose. The metaphorical pirate you meet on page one can help me.
This book was dense and magical and very symbolic, and every little bit matters for the story to all come together in the end, only you don’t realize that until halfway through, and that’s just way too many pages to re-read when you clearly need to be finishing the book instead of doubling back to figure shit out.
Anyway, I’ve said nothing about the book itself, only my experience of it, and that was intentional. Perhaps one day I will write an actual review. I’m definitely re-reading this, probably next year, because I think it’s one of those books you can only really appreciate the second time around, once you know what it’s really trying to do.