Last Exit

by

304 pages

English language

Published Jan. 20, 2022 by Doherty Associates, LLC, Tom.

ISBN:
978-1-4668-2614-4
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2 stars (5 reviews)

Ten years ago, Zelda led a band of merry adventurers whose knacks let them travel to alternate realities and battle the black rot that threatened to unmake each world. Zelda was the warrior; Ish could locate people anywhere; Ramon always knew what path to take; Sarah could turn catastrophe aside. Keeping them all connected: Sal, Zelda's lover and the group's heart. Until their final, failed mission, when Sal was lost. When they all fell apart. Ten years on, Ish, Ramon, and Sarah are happy and successful. Zelda is alone, always traveling, destroying rot throughout the US. When it boils through the crack in the Liberty Bell, the rot gives Zelda proof that Sal is alive, trapped somewhere in the alts. Zelda's getting the band back together--plus Sal's young cousin June, who has a knack none of them have ever seen before. As relationships rekindle, the friends begin to believe they …

2 editions

reviewed Last Exit by Max Gladstone

Review of 'Last Exit' on 'Storygraph'

No rating

I’m also a millennial, about a year off from Gladstone’s age, so I get that this is a very personal and heartfelt outpouring of his feelings about Black Lives Matter, flowing from having been through the Occupy protests and electing Obama and feeling like maybe we’d done things right but then nothing was fixed and things stayed dark. I get that. 

But I also wish a brave editor had been willing to cut like…30% off the long internal monologues of each of the characters. There’s a lot that’s good in this book, and a lot of wonderful ideas and images, but… it’s so bogged down and repetitive that it’s hard to enjoy the ride.   

reviewed Last Exit by Max Gladstone

Review of 'Last Exit' on 'Goodreads'

3 stars

A magic realist journey to the dark heart of modern America.
Three stars, been a while since I scored this low. It's not something I like doing but this is where I ended up with this book.
This dragged for me. I felt it was overlong and quite a few chapters could just have been dropped with no interruption to the narrative flow. Especially the first third which is told from the point of view of one of the 5 protagonists and really needed some tighter editing. The book picks up through the middle third, to the point where I was thinking it would be 4 stars but I started not caring again by the end. This is why I probably didn't understand who the antagonist was meant to be or care about the denoument. I was nearly at a 'did not finish' 86 percent of the way through but …

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rated it

4 stars