Thursday, January 23, 2014

Aquifer (2013)

Aquifer. Jonathan Friesen. 2013. Blink. 303 pages. [Source: Library]

I really wanted to love Aquifer. I thought the book started off promising. It had an intriguing start. I was curious about the narrator, Luca. I was interested in learning more about Luca's father, and how these two fit into their society, their community. The unveiling of this world was certainly mysterious enough to keep me reading in the beginning. The part that hooked me, I admit, was Luca going with his friend to the cave and finding the long-thought-lost, definitely-forbidden books. Such a good start led me to hope. Unfortunately, the second half of the novel did not work for me. Luca's quest or Luca's journey (I'm not sure it qualifies as a quest exactly), was troublesome for me in that the further he went, the more confused I became. The plot went from being easy to comprehend to super confusing. If I'd read the book over a series of days or even weeks, I would blame that completely on me, on my attention as a reader. But when you read a book in one sitting?! I don't know that it was completely my fault for not following every twist and turn of the plot. I kept reading because I wanted to see how it ended. And I was able to hold onto threads of the plot enough to make some sense of it. But was it satisfying? Only in part.

© 2014 Becky Laney of Becky's Book Reviews

2 comments:

Kailana said...

It was kind of funny... I was doing my early morning blog-hopping and I was like "where's Becky?" You almost always have a post by the time I blog-hop. :)

Suko said...

Thanks for your honest review, Becky!