Julie • bujo.books's Reviews > Rakesfall

Thank you so much to Tor for sending me an ARC in exchange for an honest review.

Written in several vaguely connected, uniquely formatted short stories, two souls keep meeting and being torn apart throughout time in a world where the ghosts of the dead live their undead lives among the living.

I was so excited when I read the synopsis of this - but it turns out that this book was nothing like what I thought it would be. I was anticipating that this would be similar to This is How You Lose the Time War, with a love story surrounded by an esoteric plot, but this was not a love story and more esoteric than any book that I've ever read - and while I love weird books, this didn't work for me. I loved the first story - about a cult TV show where people believe the characters will transcend the show - but was expecting to get some sort of answers at the end of the story if not the book as a whole, and we never did. The story about a girl who moved in with an older woman haunted by her husband was probably the second best to me, probably because I fully understood what was going on. There were a couple very short ones up front that were heavily about political divides and nationalism and etc tearing up personal relationships, which I liked the themes of. But the further we went, the more incomprehensible the book became. The connections between the stories felt tenuous enough that I wouldn't have known that the characters were all the same were it not in the synopsis. Maybe that's because several of these stories were published in other places first, and maybe were shoved in rather than written for this collection - I don't know. I just couldn't understand what was happening even while I was reading it.

Overall, this book completely lost me. I couldn't tell you what happened in it. I got some of the themes, but a lot of this went over my head.