This was an ambitious book that I\u2019m glad I finally read. Set in Chile, it walks the line between biography, magic and fiction. I really like stories that span generations, especially towards the end where we can look back to where things started and make connections.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Any time you are reading a translation you need to keep that in mind while interpreting the writing, but this particular translation from Spanish to English is phenomenal. It comes across naturally and rarely felt awkward. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
As for the writing style itself I often felt overwhelmed – the story is presented as a giant wall of text and breaks are rare. This is a long book, and sometimes it was hard to keep going after a long block of text. The writer also was fond of foreshadowing, which was used skillfully most of the time. After a while I started to dread the foreshadowing drops, it started to feel like a gimmick to me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This was a long story and it took me a long time to finish it, but the conclusion was well worth it. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Next I am reading All That We See or Seem by Ken Liu. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
This was an ambitious book that I\u2019m glad I finally read. Set in Chile, it walks the line between biography, magic and fiction. I really like stories that span generations, especially towards the end where we can look back to where things started and make connections. Any time you are reading a translation you need […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[14],"class_list":["post-3961","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-books"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pOpl7-11T","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3961","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3961"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3961\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3961"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3961"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3961"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}