Over-hyped books

Have you ever had the experience of picking up a new book which has dozens of glowing blurbs printed on the covers which makes you very excited to begin, only to wonder partway through if the reviewers somehow were given a different copy than the one you hold in your hands? 

I am setting aside the second book for 2022 already. It is The Luminaries by Eleanor Catton. It won all sorts of best book prizes for 2013, including the Man Booker Prize. The blurbs include statements such as, "The pages fly" and "A very clever, absurdly fun novel" and "Nearly impossible to put down". It makes you want to read it, huh? It is 880 pages long, but I like long books (if they are good), so that was a plus, particularly if the pages were going to fly by. 

Truly, I do not think the book I have can be the same book that was given to the reviewers. The pages have not flown. I have been reading it for four or five days now and am only on page 188. The slowness comes not from not understanding it, but because the story drags and even after 188 pages, the author has done nothing to make me care about the characters or the story. Frankly, some decent editing could have covered the same amount of story in half the pages. 

Now some people might read all the glowing reviews, try the book, not love it, and figure it must be them and not the book. It does have a lot of characters. (I can handle a lot of characters. I love Anna Karenina.) It is told in a rather non-linear style. (I can handle non-linear.) There are lots of big words and wordy phrases and sentences. (I am the queen of big words and wordy sentences, of which you, my readers, are well aware.) As a reader, I can handle the book, I just don't want to. The snide part of me thinks perhaps 2013 was a slow year for novels. Or the snider part of me wonders if reviewers were so smitten by an attractive, 28 year old female author who could churn out 880 pages of big words and wordy sentences that it caused them to not be as critical of it as they might be. 

My shorter review? It needed a more active editor. It also needed to decide between being a plot driven novel or a character driven novel. I'm good with either and both at the same time is fantastic, but neither focusing on plot or characters just didn't work for me. 

Now, if someone out there has read it and can tell me that the page-turning fun and cleverness is yet to come, I'll pick it back up. I really did want to like it. But forcing myself to pick up a novel is a good indicator that I should perhaps move on. So, that's what I'm going to do.