Reviews and Comments

When I was a teenager, I was really into stream-of-consciousness stuff. Things that would give you a headache to read them, trying to figure out what was going on or make sense of it all. It felt almost naughty to me - the breakdown of the traditional narrative, turning words more into art than literature.

That is basically what this book is. It's a series of (mostly) first-person narratives from an assortment of characters. At the beginning of the book, it kind of makes sense - it starts out from the point of view of characters that are mostly human and mostly sane and who think in fairly normal ways. Then the point of view switches to increasingly strange or insane characters the farther you get into the book.

Maybe I'm just too old for this, but I found the whole thing vaguely annoying. The beginning of the book is fine, but past a certain point it turned into long sections of repeated text and things like that. I understand that repeating things over and over is common with many mental illnesses but I felt that it could have easily been conveyed with a couple of repeats and some ellipses. Devoting pages and pages to just repeating words felt less like an artistic thing to me as it did padding for page count like a student bumping up the font size and line spacing.

Since the question seems to have been asked a lot: Yes, you need to read Borne and Strange Bird before this for it to even make the slightest bit of sense. I did more-or-less comprehend who was who and what was intended to be communicated through the book but only in reference to having read the more traditional narratives of Borne and Strange Bird only a few week earlier.