Steven M. Greenberg

I thought the plot of this book was exceptionally interesting. The idea of reading others thoughts isn’t a new idea, but the way the author approached it through the “flocking” ability of birds was fascinating and realistic. It truly sounds like something that would be possible and I was intrigued by it.

However, this was an exhausting book to read. While I thought the plot was unique, wanted to find out how the story ended, and thought most of the characters were interesting, I felt the story bogged down in many places. While this is a literary novel, I have to say that the style of writing was frustrating in many respects:

Too many exclamation marks! Open almost any page at random and you’ll see exclamation marks strewn throughout. I’d be curious to know the total number in the book. There are too many for me to count. But I sure noticed them and they annoyed me.

Too many unnecessary words. I love words just as much as the next reader, but why use 50 words when you can express yourself in 5 or 10? I didn’t find any of the words particularly difficult to understand, I just got tired of the excessive wordiness.

Too much authorial intrusion. When the narrator stopped the story to talk to the reader, it threw me completely out of the story. This happened constantly, and I didn’t find it as amusing as the author seemed to intend.

Everyone sounded alike. Whether they were thinking (and they did a lot of thinking) or talking, all of the characters seemed to have the same word patterns, repetitions, and vocabularies – with the exception of Teddy, who was extremely good at manipulating to get his way.

I received this book in a giveaway from the Goodread’s First Reads program.
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