I had trouble getting into this book. Don’t get me wrong it is skilfully written, it’s just the stories of four different characters in one book seemed too disjointed to me, Not until very late in the book it kind of makes sense, but by then I already was struggling to read on. Never once the book really captured my full attention.

So even if the writing is solid, scenes very well set and characters alive, and fully formed, I couldn’t get into it and was glad when I finally finished reading the book. 

Maybe if there had been more, or better foreshadowing to certain interlinking elements between the separate stories I would have been captured instead of distracted. Just when I was well into Alex’s story, Dro, Vidente, or Khaled took me out of it because they just don’t mesh in the beginning and it just takes too long to get to the point when it does makes sense.

The four stories flow slow and are more focussed on character than actions, which, to me, made it too slow to make me want to keep reading. That and the fact that for a long time it seems as if you are actually reading four books at once that have nothing to do with each other that put me off, and no amount of craftsmanship can make up for the lack of a compelling story.

Dover publishes a lot of cheap math books. Is it then coincidental that many of them are also of poor quality? Coddington's book is no exception. It's bone-dry and boring to boot.

I've often wondered why I've never come across an interesting differential equations textbook. Maybe the problem is me.

This book managed to surprise me in a lot of ways. In a good way. You have four people, four plots, for very different perspectives and no idea how or why they're connected.Though there are four different plots, I didn't get confused about who was doing what and with whom and why. You know how it happens sometimes, that you get more than one plot and it's not very clear when the story changes and when the perspective shifts and you are left wondering "What the hell am I reading?". I didn't feel that with Differential Equations. And I didn't feel that the stories where lacking some details, or that they were thin. Even though you get four stories, they are so well written and so full of details, I felt like I was reading four books at the same time.There are a lot of surprises. Each and every time I managed to think of a way these four people were connected, the following chapter would always prove me wrong. I think that's the one thing I loved most about this book, the fact that I wasn't able to foresee anything. There might have been little things that made sense to happen in a certain way, but the important things were a mystery to me until the very end of the book.There were several scenes that made me very sad in this book. I guess they were a sort of lesson for the main characters, but I still felt incredibly sad for them. That's another amazing thing about this book, the fact that I felt so connected with the characters. And it was one of those books where you can't stop reading.It was an amazing read and I think you should give it a try.