Disappointment: A Review of The Seventh Mansion by Maryse Meijer
Everything--and I mean everything--about this book should be right up my alley, but it just does not hit, unfortunately. I wanted to like this book desperately , I cannot begin to say that enough. The synthesis of ideas and themes is incomplete; everything drags as scenes where what is happening differs minutely but what is being said thematically is frequently the same. The formalistic changes in style are sort of experimental, but rarely have much impact and often seem more like a half-edited first draft of a Tumblr post by a particularly edgy teenager than it does a series of strictly edited deliberate choices, which is what is needed to make this kind of non-conventional style work. The reasoning behind some of these stylistic choices is often unfathomable. Why is everything all one big paragraph? Why is dialogue neither partitioned by a line break nor notated by quotation marks? Why do we switch to the pronoun you here specifically; and what is the pattern? Why is this sentence br...