I had never read any novels by Prose before, and I picked this one up because it looked interesting. I ended up buying both the audio version and the novel itself (at different times) so apparently I was meant to read this book!
I started listening to it in the car, and at first I was less than impressed. I've heard many good things about Prose as a writer, none of which were present here. The novel was both slow and repetitive. Written from different points of view, the novel would present the same action sequences from different characters' perspectives--but, rather than summarizing, the dialogue was sometimes repeated word for word. Characters' thoughts would be reconfirmed by another character, and I found myself feeling really frustrated and thinking 'I know that already! Get on with it!'
However, Prose's characters were undeniably fantastic. I couldn't stop listening to the story. Even when I thought 'nah, I'm going to stop and listen to something else,' the characters of Bonnie, Vincent, little Danny and Max, Meyer, all of them would get to my brain. I finished the book today, the text version, because I needed to find out the end of the story and wasn't going to be driving anywhere until tomorrow.
The ending of the book was satisfying, but it made me nervous for awhile. Given the beginning of the novel, it wouldn't have surprised me for it to fall flat. Fortunately it ended exactly the way it should have.
2 comments:
I dug Changed Man okay, but it's nowhere in the league of her novel Blue Angel. That book rocks the casbah.
Awesome...I'll have to check that one out.
And of course I was in love with Vincent quite early on in the book which just continues to prove what we all already know about my staggeringly bad choices.
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