I really wanted to like this book more than I did. Halfway through I abandoned it, then after reading a couple of other books I came back to it. I am glad that I persevered, as the final quarter was the best part of the book and it all sort of made sense.

Some of the passages are beautifully written. It is evocative and moving. But I wish the author had cut 50 pages somewhere in the middle and allowed the story to gallop along with a bit more clip. I suspect there were just a too few many themes going on, and they needed to be threaded and unthreaded for the story to make any sense at all. But some of those themes (such as the presumably autistic son, the social justice warrior companion) could have been dropped with no peril to the main plot.