Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I don't really understand the reviews that said this book was slow-paced -- I read it in a single week and had a tough time putting it down. For a book about a man who is literally immortal, this book actually moves along at a decent clip. First, the bad: I will say that, at points, this book gets caught up in its own brilliance and comes across as a little pretentious and heavy-handed. At other times the author seemed to deliberately choose the most confusing possible way of getting an idea across, and a few pages I had to reread several times to understand (most of Vincent's conversations with Harry, especially at the beginning, were this way). Some of the more emotionally weighty moments were given a bit TOO much weight and, rather than being memorable in the way of a beautiful view, are instead memorable in the way of getting slapped rather sluggishly with a wet towel. That said, I was so enraptured that, when I finished this book and realized it was nearly five-hundred pages, I was stunned, because it hadn't felt nearly so long. It takes a while to get going -- the first half of the book is world-building and exposition, but done so exquisitely and with such originality that I found that I didn't really care where it was going, only that I was along for the ride. The book regains its focus at about the halfway point, where all of the exposition from the first half suddenly clicks into place -- I feel the ending of the book would not have been nearly so powerful had the author not taken as much time in the beginning to give her story weight. What I dismissed in the beginning as a failure to explain the mechanics of her world was instead a vital piece of Harry's moral struggle -- we don't know how the kalachakra work, but neither does he, and what is the price of finding out? Similarly, scenes whose point I did not understand turned out to be vitally important for Harry's development and decision-making -- anything involving Phearson, for example -- and because of these scenes, Harry is remarkably well-developed for a character who spends half the book pretending to be a blank slate. The characters are very complex, the plot is complicated but fairly easy to understand, the world is wonderfully strange. There's so much to chew on in this book, and quite a lot to parse, both thematically and narratively. This book comes together at the end so beautifully that I was tempted to immediately start a second read-through just to put it all together a bit better. It has its rough points, and perhaps could have been streamlined better, but the overall experience was so exquisite that I have to give it five stars.