By: Matt Haig
“All reading, in short, is telepathy and all reading is time travel. It connects us to everyone and everywhere and every time and every imagined dream.”
I’m going to preface this review by saying that I read this book because we have a work virtual book club and this the book that we are discussing next week.
Grace Winters is a retired math teacher and she inherits a house in Ibiza from someone she knew a long time ago, Christina. When she gets there, she tries to figure out what happened to Christina. While doing so, she meets some characters, who help guide her and what she uncovers is something that she never thought she would ever experience in her life. With it is a gift, as well as the need to confront her past. With this gift, she can do good, but will she?
I’ve come to realize that magical realism and literary fiction are just not for me. There’s nothing wrong with those genres at all, but I just can’t. I was so bored reading this book. It moves at a glacial pace throughout most of it. I don’t need paragraphs and paragraphs about nothing. I know it’s going to sound strange, but this book is wordy. It takes too many words to describe something and get to the point, yet the chapters, and there are many of them, are super short. It’s like one idea a chapter, or at least that’s how it felt.
Because of how bored I was reading the book, I didn’t connect with any of the characters, I didn’t even feel empathy for any of the characters, except for maybe 1 from the beginning of the book. There are some lovely quotes in this book, otherwise it’s just blah.
Now… I am probably the outlier here. So while I have very strong feelings about this book, you can probably ignore them! Look into it yourself and decide if this is the book for you!
Publish Date: September 3, 2024
Find the book here.
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