Review: The Book of Atrix Wolfe

The Book of Atrix Wolfe by Patricia A. McKillip
My rating: 0 of 5 stars

Time to admit that I'm not going to finish this; I've finished 14 other books since I started it, and about 10 of those since I stalled at not quite halfway through, and I don't feel any pull to go back to it.

It's not because it's not a good book. It is a good book. It's just not the kind of book I enjoy anymore; it's epic and persistently serious and has a strong tragic undercurrent, and all of the characters are stoic under terrible events, beautifully narrated. It's not grimdark - the characters are not irredeemable people of bad will - but it's grimdark's slightly more humane cousin. Maybe there's a wonderful turn late in the book, but I wasn't enjoying it enough to stick around and find out.

The 30th anniversary edition which I got from Netgalley contains a few telltale signs of having been scanned from an earlier edition and has not had all the OCR errors edited out. I don't know if they'll be there in the published version or not; watch out for the error "fanner" as a misreading for "farmer," and em dashes rendered as hyphens, and that will tell you whether or not it got another pass after I saw it.

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