I was tempted to abandon this book after the first chapter, but I didn’t want to pick another book for the square I was reading it for. A lot of animals and a lot of people die in this book, and I don’t feel that the payoff of the story is worth the suffering. There’s also rape, and insane levels of child abuse. What is almost worse is the way that the children come to devalue their own lives as a result. I was rooting against the main character for most of it. In retrospect, I’m not even sure the story makes sense when you start to think it through. I mean, I don’t actually see why all the cruelty was supposedly necessary given the ending.

I debated between one and two stars but I’ve rated books that I’ve enjoyed more at two stars, so…

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I'm really not crazy about this book but I was amused by these lines:

“Ow! I’m not a two-by-four!”

 

“Don’t be such a baby. I don’t have time to suture.”

The Library at Mount Char defies easy labels, something like dark fantasy slash horror with an incredibly black sense of humor, but both more fun and less fun than that sounds.  The opening positively crawls along, and it's not until maybe halfway through that I began to make sense of the incredibly complex world. But once the teeth catch, man, that shit really rolls. Mount Char makes an abattoir of various philosophical and religious questions, often literally. Violence is commonplace and bloody, which alternately hit my macabre sense of humor, or fucking grossed me out. Hawkins also manages to pull one of those long cons with the plotting, where he's doing this thing out in the open, but you're not even paying attention until it comes together with a bang.Very enjoyable. 

I started this book more than three months ago. I kept coming back to it and deciding to read something else. Today I did that again and decided this one just isn't for me.

It's well written: strong characters, vivid action, a clear sense of place and lots of "something wicked this way comes" foreboding. But the pulse that beats beneath the start of this book is one of protracted, ritualised, violent abuse of children.

I'm sure there's an intriguing rationale for the abuse. There may even be a rebellion against it but I don't want that abuse in my head so this book and I have no future.

I haven't given a star rating as I don't think it's fair, given how little of the book I read. I'm putting this down to a poor buying decision on my part.