Rotherweird by Andrew Caldecott
My rating: 2 of 5 stars
Publication Date: June 4, 2019
There are books out there that you think you should love, and fully expect to love, but when you finally crack open the spine (or your e-reader of choice), you discover to your horror that the story's a bit of a slog.
That's Rotherweird in a nutshell. The entire time I was reading, a tiny voice in the back of my mind kept whispering 'you should be enjoying this!' To the point where I almost felt guilty about how difficult it was to get through each chapter. On the surface, the story sounds grand: a town founded by geniuses, an ancient conspiracy, oddball characters, alternate realms . . . but the whole thing is told in this sort of halting, dry tone that just sucks all the life out of it.
The story feels weirdly emotionless. We're given a vast cavalcade of characters---who I had little trouble keeping straight, oddly enough---but they're drawn with so little feeling that it's nigh-impossible to care about any of them. At one point a character is straight-up murdered, and it falls upon the reader's heart with the same emotional intensity as a tax audit. The prose is very 'tell, don't show,' with a sort of blase-ness that could perhaps have been meant as whimsical . . . but if that was the intent, it failed pretty drastically.
Overall, this just wasn't to my taste.
Thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for providing a free copy in exchange for an honest review.
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