Along with The Hobbit, this novel comes up on a lot of must-read lists of fantasy books. I honestly struggled with this one. The world is wonderful and interesting but I struggled with the writing. Written in a whimsical story-teller style, it read clunky and repetitive with poor punctuation. I’ve found myself rereading sentences and sometimes entire paragraphs because I felt like commas, periods, colons, and semicolons should have been added in many places, which made it hard to understand exactly what the authors intent was, making the writing seem rushed and unclear.
Much of the book is spent with the character traveling between different islands meeting people who are insignificant to the story or the plot. There is a deeper meaning within the plot of how we spend our entire lives battling against the dark forces within ourselves but it is told in a way that is meandering and tiresome.
It’s not a bad book, I just found it boring and poorly written.