Review: Looking for Jake: Stories
Looking for Jake: Stories by China Miéville
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
I came into this book not really knowing Mieville’s style. These stories were all dark and several had a post-apocalyptic feel. Not necessarily a feel-good series of short-stories but not all books should be. Since the subject was not light and airy I will admit it took me longer to get through this book than others.
Mieville is a very good writer but his sentences are complicated (had to re-read phrases several times to get the imagery) and he uses SAT-worthy words (thank goodness my Kindle has a built-in dictionary). Again, not a bad thing but sometimes it got a bit heavy, especially since all but one story were like this.
Some of my favorite stories are Looking for Jake, The Ball Room, Reports of Certain Events in London, ‘Tis the Season (the lightest one & only humorous one), Go Between and Jack (one of the darkest stories but well written).
There was also an illustrated story – On the Way to the Front – which I struggled to understand and the longest and last story called The Tain that frustratingly was not as developed in my opinion as it should have been despite the story being dragged on.
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