This is my fourth Backman read. I loved the other three, this one... not so much. It was fine, but it was not a favorite. A lot of people hate this book, and I get why.

The characters were all insufferable. The dialogue was absurd. The ties between everyone were entirely too fabricated.

I made it to the end, so I could see what he was trying to do with this story. There were a lot of things sort-of said, sort-of stabbed at, but most of the ideas were never fully reached.

Getting to the end of this book was a chore: the character ties all wrap up, but the story never started or ended, because there was no actual story. It was all a bunch of coming together of insufferable people on a single day, telling each other their own stories and having their stories affect each other, and it took 400 pages to talk about it.