I'm torn.

This book took me forever to read. FOREVER. (Six and a half months, according to Goodreads.) I kept putting it down for months at a time, in order to read books in which things actually, you know, happened.

But the thing is, I liked the writing itself. I'm trying to resist using the word "lyrical" because it's on the back cover but I just can't help it. There's an undeniable poetry to the language and the tone of the novel is truly lovely and unique, really evoking a strong sense of place.

So I found it very readable, when I was reading it. But then I'd put it down and realize I didn't care in the slightest what happened next. Each individual chapter flowed along nicely enough, but I had zero emotional connection to anything about this book.

The characters are passive, unlikeable and interchangeable; the actual plot points in the entire novel could be summarized on a 3x5 index card (and you wouldn't even have to write small); the narrative point of view shifts around pointlessly; the metaphors are heavy-handed and the overly-predictable ending is sticky with contrived sentimentality. It's not only a big letdown in terms of action, it's a disappointment if you're hoping for a big emotional payoff too: insofar as the relationships change over the course of the novel, it's in a very "things left unsaid" kind of way. And not an interesting, charged-with-tension kind of "things left unsaid" either. Just the ordinary kind.

I suppose I should give the book credit for telling a story of ordinary, flawed, wounded people stepping sideways and slowly into a second, truer love, and in it finding healing, but I got so bored just writing that sentence that I fell asleep. It also feels less like a story about that and more like a story that desperately wants to convince you (and itself) that it's about that, when in fact it's just a haphazardly strung-together series of vignettes that hand-waves at the above storyline, slaps a coat of metaphor on it and hopes you'll do all the work for it and then give it a Pulitzer.