Blossoms and Shadows

Liam Hearn

It’s rare that I don’t finish a novel I’m reading because I like to give books a chance to improve. I’m a little less tolerant of talking books however because I only have limited time to listen to them and if a reader is bad, I don’t see why I should force myself to listen.

This one wasn’t given a chance after the second disk. The reader wasn’t great, and I struggled to differentiate the characters.

Even worse was that

the writing was dry and uninteresting. The main character was potentially interesting, a girl wanting to learn medicine from her father. But the trials of her uncle who wanted to go to a special school, no, I couldn’t have cared less.

I realise that this book is a translation from Japanese, and so a sprinkling of Japanese words is expected. In this case however, there were so many that I struggled to fix the place names in my mind.

I really loved Hearn’s other novels, but this one just wasn’t my flavour. I get a feeling this novel was meant to be a kind of history – I don’t love history. Maybe if you have an interest in this area this book could be an easy introduction for you.