Review of 'Universal Harvester' on 'Goodreads'
2 stars
Reading this book felt like watching a truck try to get out of a patch of mud; the tires certainly spent a lot of time spinning, but we sure weren't going anywhere.
The setting and inciting incident were promising enough, but they only served to get me in the door and were quickly discarded after the first third or so. I was expecting to get bashed over the head with a nostalgia hammer for the late 90's and go down a sinister path of depraved home videos that lead to some twisted climax. Instead I got a decades-spanning family drama and characters that actively resisted anything interesting.
Which is a shame because the prose was actually good and there were a few lines that impressed me with their wordplay, but that alone doesn't carry a book. There was also a strange choice in narration style; it was some kind of …
Reading this book felt like watching a truck try to get out of a patch of mud; the tires certainly spent a lot of time spinning, but we sure weren't going anywhere.
The setting and inciting incident were promising enough, but they only served to get me in the door and were quickly discarded after the first third or so. I was expecting to get bashed over the head with a nostalgia hammer for the late 90's and go down a sinister path of depraved home videos that lead to some twisted climax. Instead I got a decades-spanning family drama and characters that actively resisted anything interesting.
Which is a shame because the prose was actually good and there were a few lines that impressed me with their wordplay, but that alone doesn't carry a book. There was also a strange choice in narration style; it was some kind of omnipotent first-person narration which you can't clock until the first "I" is casually thrown in somewhere after page 40 and doesn't show up again for several chapters. Like I was being told this story by someone who was trying to remain impartial but occasionally let their own biases bleed through.
What we're left with is a sort of mystery that no one really seems to put the effort into figuring out, and if the characters don't care, why should I?
