juliageiser

I'm sort of atheist, and was raised sort of agnostic, so I don't know much about Mormonism, and, because I'd read the short story this novel was based on, the information about how Mormonism works is probably what I'll take away the most--it was pretty interesting, learning about the subculture, since all I knew before was "lol polygamy". The actual meat of the books... eh. I did not enjoy slogging through 80% of the book to get to the 10% that was that "real" plot, as advertised on the back, and as recalled from the short story. I can't pinpoint if it was because I knew the ending already and was getting impatient when the book never seemed to get there, or because Card is so good at drawing out some truly uncomfortable, horrible and miserable situations that he puts his characters through. Not scary--just depressing. Awful people at work, crazy people at church, psycho people at school, without enough islands of relief in between to let the reader rest before something else horrible happens. Maybe that's a pacing issue, or maybe it's GOOD that the tension does not let up almost EVER. I didn't like it, however. A source of unintentional humor, though, is all the ancient computers mentioned in the book. I believe at some point one of the evil office people says (paraphrased) "You couldn't even FILL 512k of memory with code!" or something like that. In the end, I pretty much only bothered finishing the book, because I wanted to see how this longer version played out. I won't read it again, though, I'll just stick to the short story. All the punch, none of the slogging.

2023-01-11 22:22