Can you say pretentious

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This book was not for me. Clearly other people love this book but I personally found this book smug, unengaging, and ostentatious. It felt like a smarmy private school Old Boy trying to tell me that I just don’t *get* the depth and complexity of the narrative and they’ll gladly keeping on explaining the literary devices to me until they are smashed against my grey matter into submission

I was not gripped by the writing style nor the plot. For me, the mysterious elements fell flat and I found myself dragging my feet through this book and really not caring what happened to our protagonist. I was not charmed by the world building, for me it was convulsed and serves more as a vessel for the author to demonstrate how clever they are than to assist the reader. The pacing was off for me as well, this book was too slow to be able to hook me and I truly did not care what happened in the end. It also doesn’t take a genius to work out who the villain is early on in this book.

My only shiny light was the audiobook narrator. Chiwetel Ejiofor is a gem who we should protect at all costs. His performance is brilliant and is the only reason I finished this chaos cloud of a book.