Bingyi Li Li itibaren Laithes, Penrith, Cumbria CA11, Regatul Unit al Marii Britanii şi Irlandei de Nord itibaren Laithes, Penrith, Cumbria CA11, Regatul Unit al Marii Britanii şi Irlandei de Nord

I love the author's style! The first chapter is amazing. He picks up all kinds of small detail and makes up this moving, lovely, intriguing world. He brings in characters that aren't really integrated into the story but appear for a few lines and open up new questions: you know that there is a lot to each of these characters that you meet for a paragraph only, even though you will never know what that is. The small details remain a strong point throughout - the different manifestations of ice, the different ways that people have of dreaming, the different experiences of death, the idiosyncratic things that mark people forever. The story tries to hard and ends up becoming very gimmicky. Even the initial premise comes to feel unsatisfying when it is examined too closely. I found the attempts at telescoping the fact that the story is in the future too conspicuous and frequent (all the large mammals have died out, one of the main characters drinks wine from '27, etc.), like little "we are still in the future!" pokes that wake you out of the story. This is exacerbated by the fact that the future doesn't seem culturally different from the present at all, and that small details (viral marketing? finding things on 'the Web'?) really evoke the 1990s. We have heard the story often before, but apparently the characters haven't. His people are unconvincing as people, and you never get a clear sense of them as the sorts of people who have an inner life, or any sense of what that life could be. None of them seem to have personalities. At the same time, you get an amazing sense of what it's like to be in their body - the descriptions of one character's experience with the cold are particularly well done, vivid with small details. More importantly, the different characters small memories (these come up throughout as part of the story) are amazingly told, and convincing. They don't serve to drive a particular point forward (which I think is a problem with many authors who use flashbacks as part of their narratives); instead they are poignant, and convincing, and inexplicable. Overall, there are many annoying details that could have been improved with better editing, but the book is unusually beautiful.