Title: Bunyan’s Guide To The Great American Wildlife
Author: Quentin Canterel
Publisher: Acorn Independent Press
Date of Publication: October 11th, 2016
Genre: General Fiction
Number of pages: 262
POV: 3rd person, 1st person, and 2nd person
Series: No
Where you can find this book: Amazon
Goodreads synopsis:
What happens when the Manhattan zoo empties its cages?
John, part radicalized anarchist, part ticking time bomb, is haunted by a particular story, that of Willow, a 9-year old mute who flees to New York after her brutal rape. The only way his girlfriend, Felicity, can stop the clock counting down is by disentangling the riddle of their pasts before their entwined futures are blown to pieces.
Quentin Canterel’s second novel presents a collage of voices, dead and alive, in a unique and unnerving novel that experiments with form, structure, and language.
Truly a mystery shrouded in an enigma.
My review:
This was a very hard book to read. Not because of the subject (9-year-old mute girl gets gang-raped) but because of how it was written. Normally, I am pretty good with numerous POV’s in a book but this one, well it was all over the place. One chapter would be in 2nd person, then another in 1st person, then back to 2nd person and then to 3rd person. It was very confusing and I couldn’t keep track of who was “talking” half the time. Not something that really makes a great reading experience.
Another reason this was a very hard book to read was the wordage. I am not stupid, far from it, but I still had to use my Kindle’s dictionary to figure out what some of the words meant and when they weren’t available on that, I had to google the word. Yes, google it. That lowered the book’s esteem in my eyes.
This review is going to be very short because, honestly, I can’t say anything good about the book. The plotlines were awful, the characters came across as either immensely screwed up, immensely stuck up or both and I just couldn’t get past Felicity and John’s “romance”.
How many stars will I give Bunyan’s Guide to the Great American Wildlife: 1
Why: I didn’t like the book and found it very hard to read. The POV’s were changed lightning fast and without notification, the characters were not very relatable and the language they used was very pretentious. I did not enjoy reading this book at all…which is sad because books should be enjoyed.
Will I reread: No
Will I recommend to family and friends: No
Age range: Adult
Why: Violence and language
**I chose to leave this review after reading an advance reader copy**
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