This book won a Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2011 and I heard somewhere something about it, so when I saw it in second-hand bookshop the title seemed familiar and I grabbed it. I read it during my crazy January among eleven other books, most of them being non-fiction, so maybe that affected my reception of this book. I am trying to explain myself because honestly I didn’t like this book. It wasn’t horrible, I did finish it, but it wasn’t anything special in my humble opinion.

The story jumps from character to character, into the past and into the future. It’s not as much a characters based story or a plot driven book, it is more a log of interactions and connections between people at different stages of their lives. It is about passing time, about people touching each other lives in different ways without even noticing sometimes. But what I lacked was the emotional connection. I didn’t care about any of the characters because the story jumped so often it was difficult to form any sort of attachment. Different things happening to the characters were presented only to be abandoned few pages further. It was an equivalent of watching news channels from three different countries at the same time – short attention span, no time to develop a relation. I guess it may have been intentional to show how scattered our world is, but it didn’t buy me. The writing was good, I just missed the emotion. I feel about this book similarly as I felt about ‘A Spool of Blue Thread‘ or ‘Gabriel’s Gift‘, high expectations to start with and lack of feeling at the end.

Photo by Violetta Kaszubowska @ vkphotospace