The New York Times bestseller by the author of Cloud Atlas | Longlisted for the Man Booker Prize | Named One of the Top Ten Fiction Books of the Year by Time, Entertainment Weekly, and O: The Oprah Magazine | A New York Times Notable Book | An ...

A lot of NUBClub members are very big fans of Mitchell, so this was a high stakes read for us. Unfortunately, most of us were disappointed. The book started strongly, with the dense and beautiful style that we love about Mitchell, and the themes stayed within Mitchell's wheelhouse of con artists, bullies, and victims of the powerful being exploited. It also had just enough magical realism with ghosts and strange time manipulations. But then the third act comes, and the wheels come off the bus in a shocking cheesy way. What was previously a mysterious set of coincidences and manipulations becomes a defined enemy in an alternate dimension. What was previously a motley assortment of haphazardly colliding strangers became an adventure party. And, most horrifyingly of all, what was a careful and well paced literary story become a faux-action blockbuster boss fight. There was a chase scene. There was a psychic duel. Seriously. Now, we supposed if this was a fantasy novel by a skilled genre author, this could have worked, but Mitchell is not a skilled genre author, and so it was stilted and overwrought and frankly embarrassing. After writing so many powerfully ambivalent and unresolved novels, we just couldn't understand as a group while Mitchell had to go to such a pat plot conclusion and such hokey action movie tropes. So while a few of us could hold on to the good in Mitchell and enjoy the ride, the rest of us were left stunned, wondering where the incredible writer of the first half went and why such a consistent creator decided to stray into some amateurish territory.