Reviews

I need more distance to consider my rating. For a large part of the first half, it was on its way to five stars. Brilliant and engaging and insightful. But with the second half, the multitudinous storylines grew a little tiresome and it didn’t seem worth it to try and piece anything together anymore. I just wanted it to get to the end. Review of 3 or 4 tbd.

andreacpowers's review against another edition

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2.0

Well I finished it so that's a 2 star rating. See other 1 or 2 star reviews for comments. Won't read anything else by him.

ali3689's review against another edition

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adventurous challenging mysterious tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

jenpaul13's review against another edition

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2.0

In a reality where information about every citizen is publicly available and searchable, the thought was to allow for transparency and reduce the existence of violence. Nick Harkaway's Gnomon explores this world as an investigation brings some disturbing things to light.

To read this, and other book reviews, visit my website: http://makinggoodstories.wordpress.com/.

The case of Diana Hunter's death during an interrogation has been assigned to Inspector Mielikki Neith, a respected investigator, who immerses herself in the neural recordings from Hunter's mind. In doing so, Neith is exposed not just to Hunter's mind and life, but to three other people's minds and stories, which drains her both physically and mentally. As Neith attempts to make sense of what she's learning from the recordings, she's finding repeated information that she believes will be the key in solving the case, but is disheartened when the paranoia of Hunter starts to invade her thinking and highlight that everything in the System is not as it seems.

Far too dense with overly detailed prose that is utterly unnecessary and bogs the reader down with so much information, often in the form of infodumps, that it becomes difficult to parse out what's actually relevant - perhaps this is a ploy to make the reader experience the situation as Neith does, but it's incredibly off-putting. Very rarely do I consider DNFing a book as I feel I ought to give it a fair chance (and I know that there are those of the opinion that I ought to give up on more books), but as I slogged my way through this narrative, I considered on multiple occasions whether to just stop reading it. The concept that was introduced in the synopsis for this novel was incredibly intriguing; however, this text doesn't deliver well upon that synopsis, nor does it really develop any momentum, until well after half-way through the text, which is the only reason I'm mildly happy to have not given up on this book throughout this reading process because those intriguing concepts began to be explored at greater length.