kateslatealways

The book felt more like an experience than a story, albeit not a particularly interesting or enjoyable one, nor one I would choose to experience again. A lot of the book was build-up for the remarkable thing, and it's not until you look back that some of the (smaller) remarkable things become clearer, although it's often irritating to get through all otherwise meaningless prose.

The book went back and forth between the present day life of a young woman who was there on the day and then back to the morning / day of the so-called remarkable event, and it's not until really near the end you find out the significant connections. Very few of the characters mentioned were named, so they were harder to connect to, even if we did learn a lot about their life, quirks and past, and I found that the protagonist was the easiest to identify with. There were just too many unnamed characters to try and remember them all, let alone care about them. Switching abruptly from the past to the present every other chapter didn't really help that either.

You know those beautifully written sentences that really lend weight to the believability of a scene? Those are what the entire book is composed of, and while you marvel at their beauty and poetry at first, it's easy to quickly tire of them, even though you don't really want to. I suppose it's meaningful in that when you see such beauty all the time it quickly becomes meaningless, or something similar, it eventually bogs the (already tedious to get through) story down.