[September 5, 2017] Marking for rereading. I decided to pick this up and try it again because I've heard the series gets so much better. I'm going to continue with the series but my god, I really got the review right the first time around. This is so unenjoyable.

I mention all of this below, but the sticking points to me are:

1. Quintin is THE WORST. He could be an exploration of someone suffering depression, but the author doesn't do a good job telling us that's what this is. Instead, people tell Quintin he chooses to be miserable and often, it seems that way. And depression is NOT a choice. The messaging is so convoluted and at the end of the day, all it produces is an intensely unlikable character who I wanted to punch, constantly. We'll talk about his misogyny next, but WARNING that Q likes to use ableist language too; he repeats the word

Spoiler

retarded

and later describes someone as

Spoiler

cripple

.

2. This is full of misogyny. Every woman is described by their attractiveness to Q and often by their breast size and
2b.

Spoiler

The slut shaming is real. Even when Q thinks Alice is dead and she's mourning her, there is no acknowledgement of how he treated her WHEN HE WAS THE ONE WHO CHEATED. His relationship with her was very ownership-focused (on account of being a misogynist) and I really hated every second of it.

3. The pacing and plotting were so strange. It felt like it almost wanted to be one of those adventure books where Hobbits walk along and discover mini-adventures, seemingly randomly or in an unconnected fashion. It didn't work. Instead it felt disjointed and poorly paced. We get bits of randomness like Q spending a ton of time building up his magic only to quit it completely in a few pages. Or fox sex. FOX SEX. Or a few chapters dedicated to freshman year and like two pages to senior year. It was all over the place.

Not a good book. Not one I would start unless you have the fortitude to commit to reading the next two. Not that I know that either of those are good books... We'll see.

[May 23, 2014] In a nutshell: moderately entertaining and unnecessarily long.

Two stars seems a little low, but if we're following those descriptions, then this was just okay and I wouldn't go as far as saying that I liked it.

First and foremost, none of the characters in this story were particularly likable. Likable characters aren't a requisite, to be sure, but in this case it is a detriment to the story. I found Quentin completely insufferable. At points, it seemed like an intentional choice by the author: Quentin is an unhappy person who unhappy things happen to. At other points, I wondered if the author really knew what he was doing when he added some background things into Quentin's voice: whenever a female character showed up, he only described her in attractiveness and breast size.

The worst part of it all is that I was expecting a change, and never got one. Quentin started the book an entitled, selfish prick and then he sometimes became an aloof, selfish prick, or an angry, selfish prick, but the selfish prick portion of it was always pretty intact, even we he came face to face with a selfless sacrifice.

Without getting into details, I feel like Alice is slut shamed and I hated that entire turn of events and portion of the story. I know emotions were involved, and complicated ones at that, but it is never acknowledged that Alice did little to nothing wrong. It made me really prickly about her relationship in the book for that fact.

Because the characters are mostly unhappy, and because they don't change very much during the interim of the book, this is a cold book. I made zero connections with them, with the world, or with the action. The emotions they felt, I never felt. These were flat words on the page, and so even when the words were pretty, it was hard to enjoy.

Grossmen fits five years of school and a visit to another world in 400 pages. It enjoys the contradicting consequence of both feeling like too much action of those pages but too many pages as it is. The story ambles at points, skips around from here to there with very little reason for giving us particular details or back story. Scenes feel unconnected, developments happen awkwardly. The last 10% of the book did a better job at this, but over all, Grossman limply delivered resolutions to his own plot.

I'm not sure what else to say. It wasn't terrible. Everything about the book seemed to just miss the mark. Too much and too little govern the entire story and left me pushing myself to get through it and then pretty unimpressed by the end.