I wanted this book to be good. I would say better, but I was so annoyed as I was reading it, I couldn’t even muster up enough. It’s perfectly well written throughout most of the novel, but I started getting my early sense of the cracks. But I started to get really annoyed.
The book is a lot like a mix between Matilda and Exit West…so elements of emigre literature and statelessness and then the love and redemptive power of books.
But then, but then, the book goes out of its way to link itself to Don Quixote, even making an allusion and then explaining the allusion. (Oh your dad called a dog Rocinante, ok…..oh ok, now your narrator is telling me this is Don Quixote (the most famous novel ever)’s horse).
And so I get annoyed not only because of the unnecessary condescension, but because her character is NOT a Don Quixote. We’re supposed to love her and think she’s great and be charmed by her, while Don Quixote has plenty of charming qualities, he is being lampooned in his own novel. So it does not work.
Add all this to literally dumping lists of famous and impressive authors the character is reading at our feet without attempting to weave their influence into the story, only to list them and move on. A crime authors can do is remind me of the better books I should be reading instead. And a worse crime is to have their main character say something (fakely) charming and then have another character just laugh at them.
(Photo: https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-cosmological-nothingness-of-azareen-van-der-vliet-oloomi/)