Blue sky, green trees.

I liked the plot a lot, and many of her points about group-think (especially on the left) really resonated with me. However the writing style was really hard for me to get into. The main character is very neurotic, and the author does a great job of showing us this through lots of paragraphs of her inner chatter; kudos for showing and not telling, but it doesn't make for good reading. For example, there will be 2 full pages of her spiraling thoughts between when someone says "hello" and her replying "hello". This might - might - have worked if those neurotic, scattered, spiraling thoughts were interesting, but they were not.

Good, not great. Showed a different kind of Bond than we see in the movies, which was interesting. Is this because it is the first book, and the later books will be more typical? Or did the movies change things to be less nuanced?

I read it as a teenager and remember more details about it than I do for some books I read just last year. I also remember that once she escapes and makes her way back toward home the story becomes weighed down with tedious descriptions of the landscape. Many many many pages had to be skipped (is he still talking about trees? damn. is he still talking about trees? damn.) in order to make it through to the end, where we finally got the payoff that the first part of the book promised.

One and a half stars because it is not necessarily bad, just repetitive. There's no way I can make it through a whole year of this so I'm closing the book in April. I almost never say this but: the movie is better.