Disappointing Read

The title of this post should be flat out didn't like it because that's more honest. But since this is my first ever post about a book I didn't like, or, let's be real -- I didn't even finish -- I'm taking a gentler approach. The book? Jo Walton's Among Others. The premise is intriguing (from the inside book cover):

"Raised by a half mad mother who dabbled in magic, Morwenna Phelps found refuge in two worlds. As a child growing up in Wales she played among the spirits who made their homes in industrial ruins. But her mind found freedom in the science fiction novels that were her closest companions. When her mother tried to bend the spirits to dark ends, Mori was forced to confront her in a magical battle that left her crippled--and her twin sister dead."

Sounds exciting, doesn't it? A little magic, fairy spirits, a spell gone bad, hints at sci-fi. Who WOULDN'T by intrigued? The reality is that I had to invoke my daughter's 50-page rule and even then I made it only to page 75 before giving up. The magic? The fairies? We get only the briefest of glimpses of either of these by the 75-page point. Seventy-five pages! And the hints at sci-fi? That comes only via the myriad references to SF book authors, titles, and characters, and I found the constant bombardment irritating. Maybe the intent was to add context? Not sure, but I found my eyes glazing over at every mention. The real disappointment for me was that nothing happens (at least not in the initial 75 pages), rather it's a LOT of plowing through uninteresting family history with brief references to things that happened off the page. Even these references are approached sort of sideways -- more of a by-the-way the twin sister is dead rather than a scene that shows us what happened. Maybe some of these things are played out or come together further in, but I just couldn't make myself keep reading. For me, reading is supposed to be pleasurable, not frustrating.

An okay read

In all the books I've read (and posted about on here), I've never before labeled one "okay." I've always managed to declare it was at least GOOD. But I can't quite bring myself to proclaim that about Liane Moriarty's What Alice Forgot. I loved the premise (a woman wakes up from a fall at the gym and realizes she's lost 10 years of her life), loved the jacket (who doesn't love bright, bold colors with cutouts?), and LOVED the last quarter of the book. But the first three-quarters? Not so much.

It wasn't that the characters weren't interesting, because they were. And the prose was smooth and smartly written. The thing that did it for me was the premise - the very component that intrigued me and made me decide to give this book a go. Because of the setup (woman loses her memory) there's a lot of time devoted to what isn't. She wakes to find that her current life - the people in it, the activities, her surroundings - isn't what she thinks/expects/remembers it (them) to be. There's a LOT of time spent on this negative space and it got tiresome for me. I had to employ my daughter's 50-page-rule (which I've done a couple of other times: Elizabeth Strout's Abide With Me and Jael McHenry's The Kitchen Daughter) and then again, and again. At the halfway point, my husband (who never really pays much attention to what I'm reading) asked me why I was still reading this book... guess I must've been vocal about my displeasure!

There was also the let's-learn-about-a-character-via-letters-written device used that I found slightly off-putting in the beginning. We see not one, but TWO, characters this way. I did get used to it - maybe that's because the letters appear at regular intervals.

Perhaps my three-quarters declaration, above, isn't quite fair. Maybe it was just past the halfway point... or somewhere between halfway and three-quarters? At any rate, at some point I DID find myself interested and reading because I was invested. It all comes together marvelously at the end. And, strangely enough, the characters-revealing-themselves-via-letters segments seemed fitting somehow by the end.