Weirdly enough, despite the opinion, I read this very quickly, in one go, as I had a bad headache and couldn't concentrate on anything else. I might well have docked my review if I had my brain at full capacity. Maybe if I'd taken another codeine I would've rated it higher.
Also weirdly, I was mostly interested in what was going on, but unfortunately it was the characters that you don't meet who were the most interesting and the payoff might be deep and meaningful for the writer but I really don't share the sentiment. From other reviews it seems there may have been a 'women disappear in relationships to become nothing but a chattel' kind of message, without their own personalities and blah blah blah, and it seems from this it's all the fault of men who haven't found themselves. I think that's horseshit, and if you don't understand how to compromise in life (man or woman) for a happy medium then perhaps you aren't ready for a relationship. Maybe it was my mindset but it also seemed that, because Ida had already done loads of stuff in her life it was some kind of life lesson for her to be ill and be the teacher of Midas. She should die because she's assertive enough to have a life? What a crock. Then all the monochrome stuff, everything's black and white to these characters, not grey, you can only have one thing or the other. Yack.
Because of the brain-pain the long descriptions were occasionally skipped through but I doubt I missed too much. Too many questions raised and not enough answered for a standalone book. I am quite sure this was the point of much of these, but - and I cannot quite believe I am saying this due to it being one of my personal annoyances with Hollywood where you sometimes, just sometimes, want anything but - I bloody well want to read a bog-standard adult novel with a happy ending for once. Are happy endings with conclusive changes in character out of fashion now? If we're making shit up in fantasy can't we just allow the characters a bit of a reprieve?
This book could have been a much more compelling concoction if there had been a genuine understanding of why Ida caught the glass disease and what the hell it was. Yes, the whole thing was allegorical, but unfortunately it didn't work like it should. Taxing your characters like this novel did is the same as taxing your readers, and when you over-tax you have to give a rebate eventually. There was no rebate. And just like tax, you only find out after the fact.
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