The Gargoyle by Andrew Davidson

Should I give this book more of a chance?

It was recommended to me by not one, but two people who thought I would love it, but I found myself skimming paragraphs before I'd made it past page 5. I usually give a book a chapter before I give up on it if I am not sure, but the initial description of the car crash just utterly lost my interest.

Can anyone tell me - is it worth ploughing through those initial pages to get to the meat of the story?

Hmmm. I don't like giving up this quickly on a book. I may try again and see if I can get past the beginning pages.

Fairynuff.

No chance of sweaty sex scenes later on, then.

I... I've never read a straight-up romance romance before.

Okay.

So I finally got through it. And I have to say, I really don't know what my opinion is!

On the one hand, it took me two weeks to plough through it. I have never taken longer than three days to read a book in my life. Not Gormenghast, not LOTR. For an average-length book it felt like work reading it.

On the other hand, after putting it down the first time, I did read it to the end.

Admittedly I skipped somewhere between 40-50 pages, because the initial burning story and the journey-through Hell bored me to tears and were painfully drawn out for, as far as I could see, no good reason at all. That I didn't feel I missed anything in the development of the nameless MC speaks to how redundant the morphine-hell-addiction-sin-redemption-journey was. That and the fact that I can figure out that it was an addiction and sin redemption trip having skimmed it only enough to work out when it had finished.

There were some... interesting... short stories mixed in with the plot. But again, I feel like I was only able to read them because they were short enough not to bore me.

It felt like five different writers wrote this. Or perhaps the writer wrote different sections years apart, at wildly different stages of her own developing ability, and never bothered to rework the older sections.

I don't think it was a bad book. And I don't want to say I don't like it. But... I'm not really sure what I think of it. It certainly doesn't justify the hype to me. Then again, it is sickeningly romantic, and I've never been a terribly romantic person. I want to say I finished the book thinking the MCs were all idiots to let an obviously severely mentally ill character work herself half to death before committing suicide, but I don't care enough about any of the characters to really think that about them.

Meh.