Shane’s Take — The Shadow of the Wind

This didn’t work for me. I’ll start with the positives. The writing was vivid and rich. The world felt real, thanks to the amazing descriptions of each street, person, etc. The story had some good complexity, and it started with an interesting premise. I just kept reading, hoping for something to happen. The basis of the story is a mystery, but rather than revealing it through clues and investigation, too often, the reader is just subjected to information dumps. It felt like some characters were just there to give a monologue to move the story forward. The worst instance of this comes near the end, where a letter left for the protagonist goes on for dozens of pages. How many handwritten pages would that have been? The letter also included details and a point of view the writer couldn’t have had. This was one of a few logical leaps that you have to overlook to believe the story. Even putting all of that aside, this book didn’t really give me a reason to care. About halfway through I just started skimming, which I never do, to see if anything interesting happened. I don’t feel like I really missed much.