What better way to kickstart 2023 than to read what every outlet, including Book of the Month (which I received the book from), named as their book of the year? Well, having now read it, I wish I’d instead continued to put it off until tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow. The first half of the book was passable enough, I thought, but that the most positivity I could manage then, and I feel misguided being even that positive in hindsight. Yesterday, I woke up sick and couldn’t do much more than sit up in bed and read a book, so I thought it was as good a time as any to wrap this one up. Turns out, the author was about to make me feel worse than any sickness ever could. I’m sorry, but what kind of insufferable misery porn is this? I can’t stand pretty much any of the major players, aside from Marx, who gets the shit end of the stick. Worse and worse things keep happening. Characters act like unrepentant pricks, yet somehow bygones are always allowed to be bygones, even in the case of Dov, of all people. The author jumps all around in terms of point of view, time, place, writing style, etc., and it often doesn’t work. And their word usage couldn’t help but come across as pretentious to me; even as somebody with a pretty deep knowledge of English vocabulary, I routinely was perplexed about certain words and honestly didn’t care enough to stop reading just to look them up. I would say more than this, except I’d be going on forever and spoiling everything; we can talk further in the comments if you think I’m wildly off base. I just… I can’t with this book.
P.S. I didn’t even mention it has the worst sex scene I’ve ever read, bar none. “[S]he put her hand between his legs, wrapping her fingers around the cylindrical chamber of blood sponges that was his (and every) penis. He felt the corpora cavernous, commanded by nerve messages from his subconscious brain, fill up with blood, and the tunica albuginea membrane, the penis’s straitjacket, trap the blood inside.”
