Antioch

After finishing Antioch my initial impression is that this is an ambitious, but ultimately flawed debut novel. Jessica Leonard took on a highly creative concept but I think the book is marred by lackluster prose and perhaps too much ambiguity. I was drawn in at first by several subjects in the book: Amelia Earhart, shortwave radio, the mystery of Vlad the Impaler...but the book kind of lost me in the middle before picking up steam at the end, albeit the book ended without providing any clear answers. Antioch is filled with mystery and deception, as the story unfolds people and events are slowly revealed to not be what they seem, beginning with a cryptic radio transmission and spiraling out until this reader could no longer trust anything he read. The writing was inconsistent, sometimes interesting but sometimes the syntax and word choice were simplistic and even amateurish in some sections (in fact between the simplicity of the prose, the unrealistic way characters behaved, and the font I actually wondered if this was a YA book at one point), and plot sometimes felt disjointed. Having read the book, I understand that Bess is an unreliable narrator, and this may account for some of the strange turbulence I found in the plot and composition, but it nevertheless this made reading the book a somewhat unpleasant experience. This may have been the author's intention, but something about how she pulled it off didn't clue me in that it was intentional until the last few chapters, and my ability to enjoy what the author was doing was diminished by what I perceived to be poor writing. This may be a deficiency with me as a reader, or it may be in the writing of the book. Overall this book just didn't seem as polished as what I'm accustomed to reading. Hey, it's a debut novel! All the same, the unreliability of the protagonist felt a bit like a Monopoly get out of jail free card to justify the confusion and plot amounting to an abrupt and ambiguous end. Yes, there were breadcrumbs of the book's conclusion scattered throughout, but the ending still felt like it came way out of left field to me. I might have liked to know a little bit more of what was going on, what was real and what wasn't. I'm sure Bess would have too, and this may be the point. But overall Antioch felt like a book too convoluted for its own good, with a journey that didn't justify the concept of the book or provide a clear ending.