Last Exit

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.   

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 …