Ours

This book will live in infamy in my book club because everyone uniformly hated it... except for me. Yes, the haters have many valid points, but I simply did not mind.

This is a long book that feels twice as long as it actually is (someone said reading it felt like clocking into work). There is a massive cast of characters to keep track of and new people continue to be introduced pretty much right up to the very end. There is no readily identifiable central plot or sequence of events one could point to as a conflict that rises and is then resolved after a climax. And that's all okay.

At the very end of the book is a note from the author who explains that he set out to create a new mythology of the African American experience that was not wholly centered around the experience of slavery, but also did not ignore it. I think knowing that before going into this book would help most people prepare themselves for it, because this is actually a series of loosely-related vignettes rather than a proper novel in the traditional sense. Stepping back now having finished it, this does feel more like an academic folklore compendium than a fictional narrative.

I don't know. I got a lot out of it, but I can also understand a lot of the criticisms leveled against it. I don't think I would ever recommend it to others unless I knew they were really down with literary fiction or just wanted a really unique take on the fantasy genre, but that doesn't mean I didn't enjoy it.