A review by a_monkey
The Cipher by Kathe Koja

1.0

I didn’t enjoy this book, really didn’t enjoy it, it was a pretty grindingly formulaic kind of body horror but I kept reading waiting for the impossibly, really just impossibly difficult to follow or enjoy prose — Jim Phelps, burn THIS tape; just digressions and nonsequitirs all over the god damn show and flow on sentences that don’t count as sentences because they just don’t stop having words and grammar be damned — to resolve or justify itself but it never did, it just keeps going on and on in this borderline unreadable writers-workshop fashion, and the ironic thing is that this is a book about how scary it is for there to be an empty blank spot, but there’s a piece of punctuation that looks exactly like that, it’s called a full stop and it goes at the end
of sentences but this book just doesn’t want to use any of those to save its life. It’s physically uncomfortable to try and read. I couldn’t recommend it.