"BOY SWALLOWS UNIVERSE" - Trent Dalton (Aust 2018)
One of my Xmas books, and there's been such a lot of noise about it, and it's now a TV series, I feel obliged to be patient with this over-written novel, but at 150k words I don't think I have enough time left to indulge it properly.
Don't get me wrong, this is well-written, and my first note (I tend to keep running memory-joggers to make it easier to do these) was - "It's like diving into a plate of your favourite meat-and-veg but there's heaps of bits on the plate you don't know or expect but they're just great." It was like that. For a while.
But 20% in now and I'm struggling and have to put it aside. As soon as you catch yourself impatiently skipping paragraphs (and once a whole page) of stuff that gets tedious, time to go.
It's like Dalton always intended to make this for Netflix. To go with trendy drugs and all the other extravagant and clever violence that's so popular nowadays. I mean, you can't avoid the TV promo trailers of the next blockbuster that's about to explode all over your screen, as there's about three new ones a day. This book has all the right ingredients. By design I suspect. But don't let me put you off, give it a fair go yourself.
Anyway, I won't abandon it, I'll get back to it, after I jump into some of the others I have waiting.
Cheers...
T.R.E.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>