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 ended up just soldiering on.
Gladstone has written lots of 4 star books (and I think I gave him a 5 once), this one was just a bit of a miss for me. Cannot recommend.