Review of the Library of Traumatic Memory

Sometimes books are clever…

Sometimes books want you to think they are clever…

Sometimes they’re both…

I loved the idea of this book, of the notion of considering the past and the future at the same time, of holding the key to realities before and after the fact and of the challenge of time travel without the invariable chronological entropy. That and I’ve always enjoyed Neil Jordans other work, it’s always thought provoking and that’s always appreciated.

Take this book.

No punctuation

Bold move.

Lack of identifying characters who are talking because it should be evident from the point previous

Bold move

Bouncing between different time zones and characters and holding the notion of the strength of the narrative to be enough for the reader to understand what is going on…?

Very bold…

But in this case, ill-advised.

Trying one or two changes to normal grammatical style would be fine, but trying those changes whilst marrying the narrative to words that need you to look them up, just to be sure you’ve got the right word and you haven’t gone down the wrong path without realising it.

No, that doesn’t work.

I don’t mind words I’m unfamiliar with, I don’t mind looking things up, often it’s a cheerful reminder of things to learn.  Words that don’t exist, or are a mishmash of existing words with the notion that reasonably, you could guess what they mean?

No.

It took a little getting used to the style, and every so often, there’s a word in there that means something else, or that could have been replaced with a more commonplace word, and I understand that that’s the reason that the uncommon word was chosen, but towards the middle of the book, I got the feeling that the author wanted me to work for my story.

And I don’t mind that.

But towards the end, I got the feeling that the story wasn’t worth how much work I was putting in to it…

The ending is clever enough, it’s a reasonable travel across time and memory, but I’d be unlikely to pick it up again for reading pleasure.  I can recommend it as a book that requires work and delivers a good ending, there isn’t a regret in the finishing of it, but I did not enjoy the reading of it. 

Thanks to Head of Zeus and the Author for the Free ARC, my views are my own, no incentive offered or accepted.