2024 Reading Challenge

2024 Reading Challenge
Jill Elizabeth has read 1 book toward her goal of 285 books.
hide

2023 Reading Challenge

2023 Reading Challenge
Jill Elizabeth has read 5 books toward her goal of 265 books.
hide

Book Review: The Gone World by Tom Sweterlisch

Wow. I keep trying to figure out how to describe this one, and keep getting lost in my own head as a result… (NB: Once you read the book, you’ll smirk at that sentence – it’s perfectly in keeping with the tone and action of the story!) There is SO MUCH going on here – not in a multiple story lines sense, so much as in an “it’s incredibly dense and the explanations are convoluted and complicated and full of under- (and over-) tones of science and religion and mythology and suspense and psychology and sociology” sense…

The book is dark and horrifying and clever and brilliant and weird and fascinating, and it has taken me longer than I anticipated to read and comprehend it all – and I’m still quite convinced I missed a slew of connections and analytical bits.

You could write a thesis on this, read it seven times, and still probably not get everything out of it… I won’t do that – it was too dark for me to say it was something I’d rush to re-read. The book wore on me; Shannon’s world is horrendous, even while it’s wildly entertaining to visit. But – importantly – this doesn’t detract AT ALL from a single read for entertainment…

I found the book thoroughly engaging and fascinating and for the vast majority I was flipping pages furiously – simultaneously cringing to see what came next and dying to get there so I’d have my curiosity sated. It’s a tour de force – and you won’t look at the world (or space!) the same after reading it…

My review copy was provided by the Penguin First To Read program. The Gone World releases in the US on February 6, 2018.

Leave a Reply

You can use these HTML tags

<a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <s> <strike> <strong>