The End of Mr. Y (original 2007; edition 2008)

Marvellous, imaginative, but it didn't capture me. The good ideas didn't quite paper over the gaps—and there were a lot of good ideas! I almost wanted to see the “troposphere” setting explored more thoroughly, perhaps through a series of short stories, or by more than one author. ( )

I waver between two and three stars for this book. At first I was very involved in it, because the main character is female, intelligent, and does what she wants; because it involved old books; because I wondered about the mystery. I think I learnt more about literary theory/philosophy from reading this and googling for extra information than I managed to learn in the whole of my degree, which included a year of philosophy -- oops?

But the more fantastical it got, somehow, the more it lost me. It didn't seem to fit together. I lost interest. I actually gained interest again in the last few chapters, and enjoyed the ending because it was what I hoped for, but...

Strangely enough, anyway, it seems to have given me a sort of handle to grab Derrida by, so maybe that'll be the next bit of literary theory I get down like medicine. ( )

What would have been a thought-provoking and well-written novel with a mind-bending ending is derailed by an annoying tendency for logical fallacy and a failure to live up to the premise and early atmosphere. Look, "quantum" has an actual meaning; you can't just use it as a stand-in for "it doesn't make sense". ( )

I felt like this was the sort of book I would write if I wrote books, which is why I don't--it was too self-consciously quirky, overly enthused with clever ideas, and didn't seem to be leading anywhere.

Quantum physics, philosophy, and the nature of consciousness. And yet it's not dry or dull, and it all makes a weird sort of sense.

Because I'm a jerk, I'm deducting a star for the awful font they chose for the paperback edition. (Maybe it's the same as the hardback, I don't know.) I understand you want to use a different font for the offset text, the excepts from the mysterious cursed book, but maybe that's the part you should set in the borderline-frilly Sovereign Light--not the main 90% of the book. It's a good book but a little hard on the eyes. ( )