Ethiopia: Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese
Thoughts: A long time ago when I read Let The Northern Lights Erase Your Name, I wrote about not wanting to continue because it would all fall apart. That book didn’t. This book did.
Maybe we shouldn’t write books about children who then get older. Maybe we should just stop at children or write about adults. Marion as a child is interesting. Marion as an adult is a bitter mess that I want nothing to do with. The virgin/whore dichotomy gets tiring. Even though he’s an adult by the end, there’s a desire to tell Marion to just grow up already.
The second half meanders and the poetry of the first is lost. Parts read like a poorly written textbook. I kept going because of the first half, but got more and more frustrated. The first three hundred pages I thought this would become one of my new favourites. The last three hundred pages I just kept mourning how badly the novel turned out to be.
Rating: 4/5