The Sol Majestic

This book is delightful, but not fluffy. Kenna's coming-of-age journey is pretty tumultuous. It's a little bit fairy-tale-like, in that the broad brushstrokes of the plot are obvious. But the details surprised me at every turn.

Technically, we only see Kenna's PoV, but the book isn't too tightly focused on him. There are references to things Kenna has no way of knowing and occasional glimpses into other characters' emotions. But instead of feeling like errors to me, those qualities contributed to the fairy-tale feel. This is a story about finding one's place in life and building community, not just a story about Kenna.

But I do love Kenna! And all the other characters too. What a cast. Montgomery was my favorite.

I'm so excited to have discovered a great author who is new to me, and I look forward to reading more of his work.

DNF - PG 54

...I'm not really sure what this is. Look, I grabbed it because it was compared to The Good Place, but mostly because I came across someone that said it was about a restaurant in space. I mean, it sort of seems to be, but... (They also tried to compare it to the cooking reality shows. Which it's not even close to that.)

I listened to the audio book. I work cleaning houses and sometimes I'm at work alone and I like listening to music or, less often, audio books. I didn't want music and this was the only ‘audio book only' on my library borrow list. If I hadn't been at work, I wouldn't have made it past the first two chapters, where our main character is first beat up then, near starvation, almost steals from a little girl.

Some of the description that day was making my stomach turn, by the way, something that didn't stop as the next day I was listening to it again and got to deal with a ‘new food experiences addict' eating raw eggs - egg shells and all, and we get treated to a description of them cutting her mouth.

I don't really know what this is, the main character is poor, but his family was wealthy at one point, he's almost starving, but his parents are, apparently, fine with going off and...look, they are quite possibly the worst parents ever and they've instilled in him this phobia of work and laborers because he has to keep himself pure so he can have this mental vision or something that the ruling elite want - only no one wants to hire his parents because these people with mental visions are not seen as all the rage nowadays - or something - and they don't even try to keep their son from starving by, you know, doing something beyond trying to sell their mental visions and... Urgh.

This was partially a rage quit, but also, I don't know what this book is supposed to be? Is it humor? There were moments, but it's way too creepy for me to call it humor. Is is satire? I kind of think it may be and if so, right there's the reason I should have never read it because I can't deal with satire.

(Please, please tell me this isn't supposed to be taken seriously.)