Picked this book up at my local library. As the library almost exclusively has German books (especially true for SSF) I ended up reading a translated version of a book about translations - what could possibly go wrong?

First of all let's talk about the translation itself. Other than the book being considerably longer (about 25% more pages) I couldn't see any big issue or thing that didn't come across right. The book uses phrases from many different languages but even if you don't know these languages the meaning is always explained either right after or through a footnote.
 
Especially in the earlier parts of the book there are a lot of footnotes and I can definitely see how that could put people off of reading this book. I did not do that to me. Honestly the science of translation part and how there is always something being lost when a text is translated was the favorite part of this book for me. The whole "balancing act" of getting a point across different languages even though the available words in the target language might not have the exact same meaning was/is fascinating to me.
I felt like the translators did a good job here but I obviously can't be certain since I have not read the book in the language it's originally written in.

Character wise we get a compelling main character and through him and his small group of friends the really dark themes about this book (Slavery, Racism, Child abuse - just to name a few) get portrayed very well. His development felt decently well portrayed although there was one moment where he did like a complete 180 but that was after a very tragic and traumatic experience so that does somewhat check out.

Plotwise it felt very predictable especially in the second half of the book I saw all the major plot points coming. But on the other hand that also felt natural to the story the book was trying to tell and I  enjoyed (for the most part) how dark and emotional (especially towards the ending) the book got.

Overall I did enjoy this book but did not love it. I think this was the first historical fiction book I read (maybe The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue but that wasn't really that much about History) and I don't feel like it to necessarily pick up more. Mainly because the dark themes feel much to real in a story like this and cut really deep. History is just brutal, that's a fact. And yeah, I certainly prefer lighter stories in general.