The Nrrdling (Aryn)

A few years ago when this book came out, it created quite a buzz for itself.  I think it was a best seller of some sort (national?  international?  who cares).  It was a book that everyone I spoke to adored; though I really had absolutely no idea what it was about, the mass outcrying that it was brilliant made me want to read it.  So when it showed up in the Kindle Daily Deals for $1.99 (or something else ridiculously cheap), I jumped on it.

It took me something stupid like two and a half months to finish this book.  Now, I know that this is a new blog and you all don't know me very well, but I read way faster than that!  It was horribly boring.  I don't know if there was something lost in translation, but it kept feeling like every time something interesting was about to happen they had to take a time out to discuss town politics.  Every time the hangman was about to start the torture of the midwife who was suspected of witch craft and murder of children, they'd have to go ahead and talk about the leper  house and all the families that disagreed with having it built, or the fucking wagon people.  I couldn't have cared any less about the transportation business and yet I found myself reading about it and it ended up having really almost nothing to do with the plot line.  And the town rivalries?  Also had very little to do with the actual plot or how it was resolved.

Things finally seemed to get less boring around the 75% mark, and they finally were interesting around 80%.  Unfortunately, by that time I didn't care any more.  The Devil character was someone I had been really intrigued with during the first month that I read this book.  By the time I found out who he was, I didn't give a shit.  By the time the "big reveals" came around in the last 20% of the book, I didn't care and was simply relieved to be having the book come to an end.  For a while there, I thought that this book was going to end up on a Did Not Finish shelf.  Luckily, that last 25 percent of the novel pulled it out of the depths of hell and only landed it in purgatory.  Therefore, two stars.

Now I'm going to move onto a book that I'm really excited to read.