Skyward Centuries, 2015.
Two Stars
While I completely appreciate what the author was trying to do with this book, it just didn’t quite work for me. The lyrical rhythms and interior rhymes of the language was like reading song lyrics, while the overall layout was like scrolling through text messages (in fact there were some whole sections of nothing but texts between characters). I feel like this is what literature will actually be like in twenty years, when attention spans are so short that people can’t actually focus long enough to read a novel.
So Julian and Liliana meet at a party, kiss once on the dance floor, and fall madly in love. They seem to think they’re Romeo and Juliet – a friend actually comments at one point on their Shakespearean language (p. 83). Even though they in fact know nothing about each other, they both wax poetic with philosophical soliloquys on the nature of love. Meanwhile, their speeches are riddled with spelling and grammatical mistakes, such as “alot”, “niether” and “your” instead of “you’re”. I could have understood the mistakes if they were only in the text message portions of writing, but they are all through the narration as well.
The writing is packed full of self-consciously obvious pop-culture references – followed by a hashtag in case you missed it! There were some odd side commentaries about social issues that made the novel into a platform for the author to shout about his own opinions. However, some of the hashtags were actually very funny and fitting. Other observations about social media and communication were thought-provoking: the author seems to say communication is getting worse (p. 302), yet he fully embraces social media in his novel.
The ending of the story was extremely melodramatic and – again – almost Shakespearean in its misdirection and confusion. The end notes were even more confusing and rambling, although parts were clever. The concept of a soundtrack for the novel was fun and interesting, although it wasn’t necessary for the story. Overall, the novel was a cross between an epic poem, a movie script and pages and pages of misspelled text messages. If this is post-post-post-modern writing, I’m interested to see what’s next.
I received this book from Goodreads First Reads in exchange for an honest review.
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