Reviewed by empressbrooke on
I should have been alarmed by the "One of the 10 Best Books of the Year according to the New York Times Book Review" tag. When was the last time I perused the NYT book review section and found anything that piqued my interest? Never, that's when, because I read things that seem interesting, not things that are meant to make me seem interesting to other people.
I only made it through 70 of the 500 pages of this book, and the idea of slogging through the rest made me want to cry. Dear LAWRD is it pretentious. It's crammed full of the most esoteric references (all cited as if it were an academic paper) arranged in paragraph-long sentences of phrases strung together by more commas than any one page should contain. I felt like I was running out of breath as I was reading. To make matters worse, the main character and her father are INSUFFERABLE blowhards who think that memorizing boatloads of obscure facts make them so much better than all the lowly peons who can't breezily spout off references to books written in 1641 about mollusks.
I think this is the first time I've ever given a 1-star rating and a 5-star rating to the same author. Maybe all the critical acclaim she got for her first book made her relax and realize she didn't have to try so painfully hard anymore to make people think highly of her. I sure hope so, because I want to keep reading books that are like Night Film.
Reading updates
- Started reading
- 13 March, 2014: Finished reading
- 13 March, 2014: Reviewed