columnclub's reviews
507 reviews

 DNF at page 193. Skimmed the end out of curiosity; was glad I DNFed. 

Maybe this is a subjective rather than an objective five-star rating, but who cares? In the first 100 pages I occasionally thought, "oh, this writing style's a little pretentious sometimes". Then I got so emotionally invested and so thoroughly on board with everything Gabrielle Zevin does in this book that even the choice of words like "ersatz" became endearing. This book joins the rare club of books that made me cry, sitting up there with my beloved Anne of Green Gables, and I'm looking forward to eventually rereading it.

I definitely enjoyed this one more than Harrow, and a lot of that was down to Camilla and Palamedes (my beloved). While I didn't fall completely in love with Nona the way I was told I would, the central mystery behind her identity is genuinely interesting and comes to a satisfying conclusion. The same frustrating habits keep cropping up, though – of hiding everything from the reader unless our protagonist can eavesdrop something about it, and dropping an out-of-place meme reference at the worst possible moment. I was too often frustrated to rate this one higher.