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I had always heard of John Grisham but never took a serious interest in reading any of his books. Probably because his books were everywhere and being pushed by all the major bookstores that I figured it must have been over-hyped. Fast forward a few decades I once again hear his name all over for making a sequel to the novel that made him famous: The Firm. I figured I am older now and no longer need to be a hater to look cool, so I decide to see if I missed out in the 90's and checked it out from my local library.

And I guess I can say I sort of did. It is a mystery thriller which is a genre I usually enjoy. It did a decent job of keeping me engaged throughout the book. The character is flawed, but not unlikable. The supporting characters also do a good job of adding to the plot and driving the conflict to it's resolution.

The story unfolds in a way that makes sense. Of course if it was set in the modern day a lot of the strategies to avoid detection just would not work. But a book is a snapshot in time and so as long as you can keep that in mind you can enjoy the ride. Overall, I can see how it was popular and would say it is worth a read if you have ever been interested in knowing what the hype is about.

I had watched the movie and really enjoyed it, and was interested in reading the novel it was based off of. While the movie left the viewer the ability to hope for something better, the book has no problems leaving the reader in despair.

Funny enough, I enjoy stories that are wiling to go the distance for the sake of the narrative themes, so I enjoyed this book. It had such a wide range in narrative structure. The main character, Monk, is a literary analyst and as a result tries to write novels that avoids the pitfalls that he thinks could diminish its artistic integrity. The author really hammers his point of view by even including nearly a whole article's worth of text written in that overly analytical style criticizing another character's novel, complete with footnotes. I certainly could not keep up with the jargon, and that was exactly the point.

The main theme of the novel focuses on the idea of how POC are treated in the publishing world, back in its liberal leaning days. Publishing companies with majority white staff and audiences both diminish a work by always categorizing it by the race of the author regardless of its themes, while also elevating works that fit its expectations.

The overall message at the end is all too real, leaving only a sense of nihilism. Just be prepared for the despair, and have your positive nihilism book on standby to help you get through the aftermath.

I have to admit I got fairly frustrated with half of the book. I mean this in a literal sense. The book follows two protagonists, each with their own story that become intertwined by the end.

Saya's story is the half that I liked. It is straightforward, in a good way. We as the reader get to see her character grow in power and learn more about who she really is. Her story is also the half that gets a fairly satisfying ending.

Indir is the other character, and her story has the possibility to be good. There is a lot of setup about the politics of the city she lives in, and a prophecy about a magical change in the world that the city's inhabitants are worried about. There is also a secret from events past that Indir carries which risks bubbling up to the surface. And there are some other city related events that the characters are concerned about throughout the book. All of those things sound interesting, but NONE of them get resolved by the end.

It turns out this book is meant to (or is, I'm not sure) be the first in a series. I suppose all of those things will or are resolved in future books, but this first book spends quite a lot of time setting them up just to leave the reader hanging. I can understand needing to leaving some things open for future books, but there are multiple plot points left without any kind of resolution; not even a half-answer to hint at where it is going. In my opinion, that actually discourages people from reading the next book because there is no guarantee that those plot points will be resolved, and that there won't be even more points that go without resolution.

I really wanted to like the book more. The setting, magic system, and the politics involved are all interesting. However, the lack of resolution for half the book's story was too much for me to really enjoy it.

The story is told mainly from the perspective of 2 characters, with portions of a 'history book' weaved in between the change of character perspectives.

The characters themselves are pretty interesting. The book is a Sci-Fi Action Comedy, and the comedy mostly comes from the narration essentially being the characters' run on thoughts. Since the narration is sort of all over the place it can be a little hard to follow, but once I tried not to think about it too much I came to enjoy the emotional/thought roller coaster.

I would have liked a bit of a break from the thought narration when it switched to a supposedly history book perspective, but that seemed to have the same style of narration only without knowing whom exactly the thoughts belong to.

The Regional Office the characters and the main plot revolve around is sort of interesting too, but does not really get explored all that much. Supposedly the organization goes on missions to save the world on a regular basis, but there's no sense of how or why the office should or should not exist. Given how lengthy the book already is though, it would have been difficult to flesh that out.

Perhaps it would have been interesting for this to be a series. The first book could have covered the formation of the Regional Office, establish what threats the office protects the world from, and getting all the characters' origins into place with the ending teasing the events that cause the attack on the Regional Office.

So in a way, there was too much going on in the book, and at the same not enough. All the characters' origins and consequences of their decisions throughout the story were told really well. The author just needed more books to really tell the story well.

The book was a decently paced drama book. It was a dramatic fiction genre with a hint of mysticism and science fiction, since the premise is that the main character skips to 16b years in the future through her wish being granted.

The impact the time leap has on the main character is decently fleshed out, with a believable roller coaster of emotions.

A large chunk of the story is focused on the main character catching up to the plot points of her life that she missed out, but it gets a little deeper when it is pointed out she also missed out on the emotional impact of something traumatic that she had skipped over.

After that though, the author tried to inject some sense of urgency that, for me, did not quite make sense as making me feel that same sense of urgency.

Since the overall tone of the book is a "feel good" story, the ending wrapped things up while leaving me, well, feeling pretty good.