First I want to say that I actually enjoyed the STORY the author wrote. It’s very much in line with his other works and the whole Greek Tragedy/Muse angle.
That said, there were 2 big issues that greatly hindered enjoyment.
First, the narration and production are pretty bad. The audio quality sounds like it was digitized from an old cassette that had been sitting in a water-logged basement for years. Also, the narrator slurred her speech often which made it even harder to distinguish what she was saying. This was a big part of my repeated “dropping” of the story. Huge mistake here IMO.
Secondly, for whatever reason, a perfectly linear story is told in jumbles. At first I thought it was a mistake in recording, but now I think it’s intentional. Perhaps the odd chapter names (i, i², 8i⁴ etc) were supposed to give the reader/listener an idea of the true order of things, but it just felt confusing to me. One second we’re here, the next we’re days (months?) in the future, and then suddenly we’re back into the past. There’s maybe one time I can see this working (since the gravity of a revelation would have been ruined if we had seen the event happen), but it happened just about EVERY chapter. Very confusing. Very annoying. Very pointless.
That said, I do have to reiterate that it’s a good STORY. These things were annoying enough that I often put this book aside for other things when it got to be too much and circled back later, but I’m glad I finally finished the (relatively short) tale.
I was given this copy of the book for free in exchange for an honest review. If you can, get the print or digital version so you can avoid the poor narration and read the chapters in a sensible order.