This is really strange situation that caused me to give up on this book which is super frustrating because I just was loving the direction it was going, the sense of humor was amazing and the writing was really good. I think im going to give this a break and come back around to it to see if my brain just needs some time inbetween books to fix this issue.
My brain just was absolutely not allowing me to put names together. I consume a lot of books and this was the first time I think I’ve seen a book do this with names and so my head I think is just not trained or has comprehension to put this together as it’s never really needed to before with a book.
So after chapter 6 I started running into this issue. The point of view changes with a heavily character focused moment where you’re getting introduced to a significant chunk of the cast. Well the point of view changes and the character your viewing from uses last names instead of firsts. The problem with that is, the full names are not really said together often enough to latch on to their character or who’s name belongs to who. This causes your brain to sorta need to de-code the name and puzzle out who’s last name belongs to the first name that you know them as.
I tried re reading the book over and over again and sometimes starting from the beginning or restarting a chapter. I think i restarted like 4 times on one particular chapter hoping my reading comprehension skills will kick in and finally get this name situation adjusted to.
Unfortunately I just cant seem to get through it and honestly my brain feels like it keeps shorting out when working through this problem and I really don’t understand why.
I understand this was a creative choice to differentiate between characters and how they speak/think but as a reader it really confused me too much. In my own way of speaking in my day to day, I just never really paid attention to half a name before and it sorta stuck as normal communication to me. If I know someone as David, I’m going to know them from then on as David and if a friend of mine referred to David in conversation as Smith I’d understandably say ‘who?’ as I just i know David as David and not David Smith as Smith. So this might just be a me problem but it’s honestly the first time I’ve ran into this complication with a book which really surprised me on my comprehension skills probably needing some work.
Overall though I loved the world building and how descriptive it was. It was super easy to visualize what was going on and follow along with where you were.
The characters were really well done too (when I could remember who was who) and I really was enjoying the dialog and some of the sense of humor. I laughed out loud audibly a few times and definetly was smirking with some of the campy humor. It reminded me a lot of some of the ridiculous situations or crude humor in South Park. Super well done.
I really wish though I wouldn’t keep getting lost with this name thing and I’d probably have enjoyed this book a bit longer.
I did have to DNF at around 50%.
I may come back to it at a different time to see if maybe this name confusion situation might just be my brain needing a break after failing so many times by re reading.