Erin M

Classic Oyeyemi

Revisado: 04-25-21

By now we all know what to expect from an Oyeyemi novel: hallucinatory settings and characters, pervasive light surrealism, everyone is delightfully queer, an ending that's kinda unsatisfying. This checks all those boxes. It's a pretty good time if you like a weird book and are okay with an ending that doesn't answer all your questions. The narrative is more cohesive and less bizarre than Gingerbread's; the ending sucks less than Boy, Snow, Bird's. I think this might be her most emotionally resonant novel, and it might be where I suggest that Oyeyemi newbies start from now on. The audiobook mostly has one narrator and he's pretty good; there's a section near the end where letters from a bunch of characters are read by different narrators of varying quality.

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esto le resultó útil a 5 personas

Narrator is FINE; story is pretty good

Revisado: 08-29-20

My theory is that most of the people who say they hate the narrator are people who miss the narrator of the original trilogy and can't handle change. Santino Fontana (Greg from Crazy Ex-Girlfriend!) does a perfectly competent job, and he DOES differentiate between characters. It makes sense that a young Snow's thoughts would be relayed to us in a somewhat flat voice; he's pretty cold and calculating. People who are mad that he doesn't try to sing the songs are mad about something that takes up about 0.1% of your total listening time.

The story itself is decently interesting. Snow is a complex character: pretty sympathetic for most of the story, but also clearly self-centered and selfish. If you're interested in learning more about this world and you don't mind something that is much darker than the original series, go for it.

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Gets much more interesting at the halfway point

Revisado: 07-25-19

Some reviewers are saying that they gave up on this after a few hours, and I agree that I spent a lot of time waiting for it to be more than just a teen drama.... but then about halfway through, it started to deliver. The first half turns out to be a novel written by the main character, and the second half is narrated by one of the minor characters who resents the distortions that the author made to their real-life high school story. This isn't so much a spoiler as literally the reason to read the book - it's an interesting meditation on fiction and memory, where you're forced to question every narrator's version of events.

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esto le resultó útil a 13 personas

Great reader, but story falls apart

Revisado: 08-10-18

This reader is excellent, switching between accents and voices seamlessly. But the story is slow and baggy, I guess because it’s trying to have the day-to-day pleasures of a YA novel (we’re getting dressed up for a date! we’re at a basketball game!) along with its much heavier actual story. The biggest problem is that the actual story falls apart at the end: one major thread (the owed money) is totally abandoned, and the rest of the story implodes in a bizarrely improbable way. I wanted to like this book — the voodoo material was really interesting — and I’ll certainly give the author’s next book a try, but this one was a giant “meh” for me.

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esto le resultó útil a 2 personas

Well written & full of heart

Revisado: 01-31-17

I expected to enjoy this for its content, not its writing, but I was wrong -- Bruce writes about his life in vivid, charming detail and with an emotional honesty & frankness that made this a delight from start to finish.

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Great story, dreadful reader

Revisado: 12-18-16

It's a testament to how great this book is that I liked it a lot despite the awful reader. I considered giving up after the first 30 minutes, but I was eventually hooked enough by the story to continue, and I learned to sort of tune out her bizarre inflections. This book's handling of gender is really cool, and it deals with identity on an interesting philosophical level.

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