** 3.5 stars **
This was such a difficult book to review!
I really enjoyed the first third, and as I’ve been listening to it alongside reading I especiallh loved the narration of it - this was superbly done!
Maybe it was the fact that I couldn’t keep my expectations level, since soo many people rave about this book, but I honestly was a bit disappointed. This is by no means a bad/badly written book, but it lacked some things for it to have become a 5-star-read.
But let’s start with the positives:
- The humour is AMAZING. Exactly my kind of humour - dry and witty British humour 😄
- The philosophical and theological questions it poses, in this humouristic way (which gave it its satire-esque vibe), were a joy to grapple with. I love it, when a book does this. When it leaves you pondering deep thoughts and questions about live and the world.
- The idea/the plot was so out of the box that it really intrigued me. And it started off strong. Letting me guess where this story might end up.
Alas, the plot somehow fizzled out, imo. The pacing was too slow for me and there were too many characters for me to keep track of. Here the audio book helped, as the narrators have done an incredible job at lending each character a different voice. Still, I felt like the wish to let all of these characters matter equally (in their own right) made it too overloaded and took away from the ending, as there were too many viewpoints coming together.
As I’m someone who normally enjoys character driven plots and well written characters this was a bit of a unexpected let-down.
I can see, why so many people love this story - and I will definitely remember the humour within it - but it just couldn’t hold me all the way to the end.
