Like Brooke is sleepy , I chose the Lee Child short story "Eleven Numbers" as one of my two Amazon First Reads picks this month, and like Brooke found it to be just okay. Lee Child definitely knows how to write, but writing about mathematicians and the Russian nuclear arsenal is clearly not as much of a strong point for him as writing about an ex-MP vigilante fucking shit up as he hitchhikes around the country. This review is about the other book I chose this month.

This book was marketing as coming-of-age fantasy, about a group of art school besties who dabble in the supernatural to augment their chances of improving their art and I can definitely say that it was mostly a coming-of-age story, with the fantasy elements relegated to very late in the book, and almost feeling secondary to the continued exploration of the relationships among the women in this book.

My issue with this book is that it goes way too granular on the experiences of each of the female characters. Maybe it was a stylistic choice to mirror the "artsy" nature of the characters, but the level of detail and description in this book goes way beyond "flowery" or "purple prose" and veers sharply into the realm of "rambling on for no apparent reason" more often than not. Most of that prose is dedicated to the characters' affections and attentions for one another and I honestly lost track of who was who at several points in the book because they were all basically the same POV character with superficial differences.

Nearly all of the other critical reviews I perused (even the ones that ultimately liked the book) commented on how slow-moving the book was, and how boring the characters were. Several made the point that the book's pace and narrative dramatically picks up in the last quarter of it, but as I've said before, spending time trudging through 250 pages of filler just to get to the 100-ish pages of actual action is a real flaw, in my opinion. It's not a "slow burn," it's a slog.

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Created Apr 27, 2025 at 2:41pm • Submit your own review...