Wow I am so incredibly delighted by this book. It is really challenging my years-long stance of "life is too short for books you're not enjoying, DNF and move on." I would have quit this book at around 30% if it weren't for the fact that I was reading it for book club (less critical, I've DNFed books for book club before, but I do prefer to push myself to finish for discussion) and moreso that one of my partner's highly recommended it. I wanted to understand why he loves it so much, so I persevered through the chunk that really wasn't working for me, and I am SO GLAD that I did.

I thought that I was a person who doesn't like metafiction, but I no longer think that's true. Despite being very different books, this book reminds me in some ways of The Spear Cuts Through Water in that they both have absolutely gorgeous prose and an atmospheric stories within stories "I don't entirely know what is going on right now but I trust the author to pull it all together" vibe. I struggled with that vibe in the first half of the book, but once some of the puzzle pieces started sliding into place with a satisfying click, I got totally hooked in and couldn't put the book down. Do I entirely understand all of the sliding and coalescing layers and threads? Nope, not completely. But I for sure don't care, because the ride was incredible.

The actual writing of this book was so incredibly gorgeous. I was really impressed, even in the chunk of the book that was a bit of a struggle for me, about what a different feeling and quality the real-world chapters had compared with the storybook chapters. The real world felt like I could step into the page right alongside the characters because it was so full of rich tiny details about our-actual-real-world authors and pop culture references and what the characters were doing with their hands and the beverages they were drinking, and the storybook chapters all were dreamy and ethereal. And as the chapters collapsed and the story all became one, it somehow was sharp and dreamy at the same time. Masterful work.

I'm going to be thinking about this book for a while, and rethinking how I feel about DNFs. I probably still will have a pretty low bar for DNFing, but in this case, I just am so so glad that I saw it through to it's beautiful end.