I ripped through it yesterday in a few hours’ time. It was so… flimsy? Like more of a too-long short story or merely an outline of an idea? It was as if Mandel just had to get something, anything to the publisher to fulfill a contract real quick. The author character made me never ever want to write a book. The characters had no depth, the concepts weren’t fleshed out, and the vision of the future wasn’t credible to me. What did everyone else think?
The author character at one point fields a question from a reader how one of the author’s books kind of just ends with no conclusion and I remember not being stoked to finish the book after that expecting it to be the case. Tbf, it kind of had a conclusion but it also felt like it kind of just ends.
I forget the character’s name who is ostracized from his royal family but I knew nothing about the book going into it and thought I was going to be reading that characters adventures all the way through. If anyone can recommend a book about a character like that please let me know. I’m not looking to read another of Mandel’s works though.