Wow. I loved this book. It started slowly and I was a little worried, since I wasn't crazy about Mitchell's previous book, Black Swan Green. But about halfway through the first section, I was completely hooked and I could hardly stand to put the book down last night. (It didn't help that I stopped reading at the end of the second section, which ends on an ominous note.)

I must admit that I read the third (and final) section very quickly this morning, not so much because I was eager to have the book done with as because I was very very concerned about a particular character who did not reappear for pages and pages.

This book isn't what I expected--after the slight Black Swan Green, I thought that Mitchell would give us another experiment with voice and form, more like Cloud Atlas or number9dream. This book is a yarn. It's a yarn with a theme, though. In some ways I think that the story is so compelling that it becomes easy to miss what Mitchell is saying about tribalism and ethnicity and religion.