The first chapter was awesome. It had a unique voice, and a perfect blend of world-building vs. character development set-up.
I spent the rest of the book waiting for it to live up to its first chapter.
The fact is that nothing of much note actually occurs in this book, something that may put off a lot of its intended YA audience. The part-time narrator, Cullen, spends his pages slipping into this off-putting third-person narration that attempts to be cute or quirky but instead doesn't add anything to character or plot development. Then, in alternating chapters, a third-person narrator--not Cullen's wannabe-pretentious-writer voice-in-his-head--describes the experiences of Benton Sage, a young man doing ministry work in Africa. It's not clear how these two storylines are related until the very end, when they come together in such a moment of coincidence that I was left perplexed as to what the POINT was.
The point, by the way, can be pretty much summed up in this sentence that appears in the last few pages:
"...life has no meaning, it only has whatever meaning each of us puts on our own life."
I suppose that was meant to be profound, and the novel to be a kind of 21st-century quasi-philosophical fable...but no. I was unimpressed, and unmoved, by this book's attempt at profundity, when it was surprisingly, disappointingly derivative.
I spent the rest of the book waiting for it to live up to its first chapter.
The fact is that nothing of much note actually occurs in this book, something that may put off a lot of its intended YA audience. The part-time narrator, Cullen, spends his pages slipping into this off-putting third-person narration that attempts to be cute or quirky but instead doesn't add anything to character or plot development. Then, in alternating chapters, a third-person narrator--not Cullen's wannabe-pretentious-writer voice-in-his-head--describes the experiences of Benton Sage, a young man doing ministry work in Africa. It's not clear how these two storylines are related until the very end, when they come together in such a moment of coincidence that I was left perplexed as to what the POINT was.
The point, by the way, can be pretty much summed up in this sentence that appears in the last few pages:
"...life has no meaning, it only has whatever meaning each of us puts on our own life."
I suppose that was meant to be profound, and the novel to be a kind of 21st-century quasi-philosophical fable...but no. I was unimpressed, and unmoved, by this book's attempt at profundity, when it was surprisingly, disappointingly derivative.
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