Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I'm going contrarian on this one. Even though The Round House won the National Book Award this year and received mostly 5 star reviews on this site, I thought it was a poorly constructed story that slowly plodded along. The overall premise (which had the potential to be interesting) revolves around how hard it is to arrest and convict a rapist on an Indian reservation due to an intricate web of Indian tribal and Federal law. But all the strings of the story were so subtle and loosely woven together that, when I got to the end, I still didn't know enough about some of the key pieces of the rape case or the ins and outs of the law to make sense of things. In fact, I couldn't figure out why the story was even set on an Indian reservation or included seemingly arbitrary interjections of Indian folklore until I read the Afterword to the book. The Afterword would have better served readers as a Prologue or Foreword. So, note to future readers, you may want to read the Afterword first. I also tried to figure out why Joe's friends blended together in my head and realized that no one in the book has a distinct way of talking, making it easier to get a feel for their personalities...in fact, there is very little "dialogue" in the book at all and the character development suffered because of it. Maybe I'm just too dense to pick up on all the pieces of a VERY subtly communicated plot (but, I don't think so)...or maybe I'm an outlier when it comes to this book's readers and the National Book Foundation judges (could be...). But, I just think books should be enjoyable to read and this one wasn't. For more reviews, check out my blog, Sarah's Book Shelves.