Tuesday, January 26, 2016

8:120 Radiance by Catherynne M. Valente

It's the year 1986 in an alternate reality. One in which man has colonized many of the planets of the solar system but motion pictures are still almost entirely silent. Severin Unk has been in front of the camera almost since birth.  As the daughter of the famous director, Percival Unk, that was no surprise. Nor was it a surprise when she went on to act and then direct her own movies as well but she went to extremes to make movies as different from her father's as could be, including almost all talkies. Her latest is a sort-of documentary about a village on Venus that has disappeared except for one lone boy who just walks in circles where it once was but no one knew that it would be the last time anyone saw her.  Now her disappearance is all people can remember and only that little boy, now grown-up may know what happened to her.

I had a really hard time getting into this one.  It jumps around a lot and there are a lot of times when it breaks off on entirely different tangents which really bugs the crap out of me.  It wasn't until about 60% of the way through that I was able to actually get into it but even then, I never really cared or connected with any of the characters as none of them were particularly likable to me. Even once I was able to get into it a bit, I still found myself getting constantly sidetracked or distracted with just about anything else that came along. It's like my brain just simply could not handle reading it for more than short periods at a time.  I've read another book by this author and did not have this same type of reaction so I think it was really just something about the style of this book which did not work for me.


Page count: 352p/2,759p ytd/253,054p lifetime

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