ppkfs's Reviews (152)

Karen Savage does a fantastic job of narrating the audiobook but this was just 10 hours of yapping. I mean, I guess I enjoyed it but I did not exactly pick up on the characterisation or whatever else people talk about in it.

More power to the people who like yapping but hoo boy.

I wonder if maybe this is a book I need to attempt for a THIRD time because I think I missed a lot of the details? 

It has all of Nabokov's beautiful prose on top of a charming main character and it's just really wholesome and quite enjoyable. It was a bit...I don't want to say boring or thin, but it's a book where nothing really happens but it does so in a charming way. So I rather liked it.

A book that was hard to read without a smile on your face, which is not something you'd expect from the author of Lolita.

Started off strong, then sort of wobbled a bit, and the end was just "I want this to be over".

It quite obviously was an homage to 100 Years of Solitude, and it started off far better - the diversity of the characters was a wonderful breath of fresh air. Then the next generation sort of...was kind of distant from their parents and completely from each other, and the last generation even more so.

It was very close to either 3 or 9 separate but minorly linked stories rather than one big generational web. It just went on too long and too disjoint. 

Everyone spoke like they were Shadow the Hedgehog talking about how they had never been happy and that everything is hopeless. I think the intent was to be a sort of reflective nihilistic late 19th century Russian novel but it didn't work. It was just too edgy.

If you happen to be needing information on how to get and maintain a state in medieval Europe, this book is great. Otherwise, it's kind of very boring. The more interesting part is how much Machiavellian as an adjective for being ruthless and amoral is ubiquitous in our society and yet there's like 5 pages on that and the rest is "mercenaries are bad because they don't have any loyalty".

It's quite amazing how Nabokov managed to write such beautiful prose that instills pure loathing in you for H.H.. It did go on a bit and the last third was a bit eh but it was certainly an experience of a book.

It was *fine*. I get that it was kind of the first proper cyberpunk novel and now we have this huge genre of cyberpunk media, but it was...fine. So much technobabble as a replacement for worldbuilding, and I had absolutely no idea what was going on in the last quarter of the book. But it was alright.

Stop reading reviews. Read the book. Seriously, any review (hell, even the blurb) is spoilers that will detract from the experience. You need to go in completely blind.

Not much happens in the book. There is never a big reveal, or a complete explanation, or really a plot, or anything.

It was still the best read I've had all year and I cried on the plane. I don't know why. 

A quite beautiful and emotional story of love and loss and redemption.

A swing and a huge miss. Wonderful premise, wonderful character, gorgeous illustrations. Started off so wonderfully charming. Then it...completely lost track of what was going on. Suddenly it was about the story of T.S's ancestor. Then suddenly his entire trip across America was just over like that. 

And I thought okay, bit disappointing the whole journey across America bit was rushed...but that was a snail's pace compared to the last part of the book.

Then he gets stabbed, kills a guy, is saved by a giant flock of birds, joins a secret club, snubs the President, his mother was secretly in on the whole plot? He feels guilt about potentially killing his brother, but this is quietly just ignored in a speech in the Smithsonian?

Suddenly there's secret conspiratorial clubs working against the government? And it's not actually about a 12 year old who drew wonderful maps? Oh but don't worry because this is introduced and lasts for about 15 pages before the book ends.

Half of a lovely lighthearted story and the rest is just 7 different pure garbled nonsense stories, none of which are related, explained, or seemingly serve any purpose.