“It was 135 pages that felt like 500.” This was one of the most astute, smart things ever said at my Rock & Roll Bookclub. My friend, Atom, was talking about a novella we had all read that took each of us an entire month to slog through. Yes, thirty days for only 135 pages.

And this is exactly how I feel about Adam Johnson’s The Orphan Master’s Son, a 400ish page book that felt like 1200. It took me more than two months to read this one and I only perserved because I’ll be discussing it at Book Riot and my resolution was to read more books outside of my usual taste.

Man, what a miserable failure this one was. For me. I have to add the for me part because this novel has been pretty widely lauded by reviewers and those readers whose opinions I respect, and yet this left me frustrated and bored.

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