Lark Benobi's Reviews > The Dark Flood Rises

There are brilliant flashes of insight throughout, which burst into my thoughts as beautiful truths--in the same way that great poetry says those things that you have always known to be true, and recognize, in the instant of reading the words (but not before), that you have always known it to be true.

That should be enough for any book to be great but some things did bother me. All the characters think nearly the same thoughts, and in the same cadence of sentences. There is a great deal--a ponderousness, even--of back story, on nearly every page. There are too many characters for me to care about, and all of them are a little bit mean, in almost exactly the same way.

So I'm settling in on a "it was okay" feeling which makes me feel guilty because I feel even so I've spent several hours in the company of an amazing person, with an amazing mind--an author who has written an at-times-glorious novel that sheds light on all the ridiculous, sentimental, hard, and terrifying truths about mortality.