Terry Pratchett is one of those authors who was hugely influential for so many of my friends, and somehow he completely passed me by until now. This is the first book of his I've read, and it's the sort of book that is very very well written but also doesn't feel like it's my kind of book, really.
Part of it is just that it's a post-apocalyptic, stranded on a desert island story, which are never my favorite kind of stories, even when they're told as well as this one is. It takes place on a world that's very much like our own in the not too terribly distant past, and it starts with a massive wave destroying everything on a chain of islands in an ocean like the South Pacific except for one boy named Mau. He had been off becoming a man, but because the wave destroys his home before he can be accepted back by his people as a man, he is now permanently stuck in a place in between, spiritually. He's not completely alone, however, because a ship from England carrying, among other people, an English girl named Daphne, is shipwrecked on his island, and Daphne (and a parrot) is the only survivor. And then things go from there.
Both Mau and Daphne are delightful, and much of the book is compulsively readable, because what Pratchett does with both language and narrative tropes is so inventive. But it's just not my kind of story, overall, and I feel like at the end he tries to have his cake and eat it too, which I understand and appreciate but which also felt a bit like cheating to me. I don't know. I feel like I'm damning it with faint praise to say that it's very good if you like that sort of thing, but that's where I'm at.
Grade: B
Part of it is just that it's a post-apocalyptic, stranded on a desert island story, which are never my favorite kind of stories, even when they're told as well as this one is. It takes place on a world that's very much like our own in the not too terribly distant past, and it starts with a massive wave destroying everything on a chain of islands in an ocean like the South Pacific except for one boy named Mau. He had been off becoming a man, but because the wave destroys his home before he can be accepted back by his people as a man, he is now permanently stuck in a place in between, spiritually. He's not completely alone, however, because a ship from England carrying, among other people, an English girl named Daphne, is shipwrecked on his island, and Daphne (and a parrot) is the only survivor. And then things go from there.
Both Mau and Daphne are delightful, and much of the book is compulsively readable, because what Pratchett does with both language and narrative tropes is so inventive. But it's just not my kind of story, overall, and I feel like at the end he tries to have his cake and eat it too, which I understand and appreciate but which also felt a bit like cheating to me. I don't know. I feel like I'm damning it with faint praise to say that it's very good if you like that sort of thing, but that's where I'm at.
Grade: B
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