So Mitchell, as an author, has always worked for me. The conceits in his books more or less rise to the level of a style and its nice to see the nested narratives of Cloud Atlas in a slightly more manageable form. Which is not to say that the story itself is not complex or that it takes a while to get into. I'm not sure if I would go so far as to say that Mitchell blends realism and fantasy seamlessly - you do still get the sense of a book in search of a genre - and he can't quite write believably stupid characters but those are, overall, minor flaws in a book that combines the joy of solving an interlocking puzzle and the pleasure of a finely constructed narrative.