Originally Posted By artdjmaster
I see you’ve found the book engaging after the first couple of chapters. I never found a moment in this book to be coherent except the part about how the sex was needed to regenerate, or something? Your review is quite glowing so I thought that maybe it was my own fault for not giving this book a chance.

Yes, I did care for this book, although you can tell from my review above, I had a number of complaints, particularly about how sexuality is treated and that the first couple chapters are essentially a false start. But ultimately, I was charmed — by the art, by the characters and by the world. Now, in the interest of full disclosure, I should tell you I tend to really like spirit worlds with complex, psychological rules — Spirited Away is one of my favorite films and right now I’m really enjoying reading Crossing Midnight, mostly because of the world it shows us.

So should you give this book a second chance? Well, if it really was because you didn’t quite get what was going on, then maybe — the world is rather complicated and you might enjoy more of it a second time through. But if there were elements — such as all the non-con sex — that just turned you off more than Honami-sensei’s art turned you on, then I’m certainly not going to argue that you’re missing an essential piece of humanity’s literature by not loving this book.

Isn’t a good book supposed to grab the reader in the beginning, though? If it gets good in the last half, how is the reader supposed to know?

Well, the writer in me agrees with you 100%. In fact, I’d argue that if you haven’t hooked your reader with the first page, you’re in trouble.

But as a reader, I tend to be a bit more patient. There are some writers who like to take their time putting the pieces into place before things get cooking. In a show like The Wire, it wasn’t until we were a quarter into the first season before it felt the game was really afoot. That did, in fact, test my patience. But the creators weren’t wasting my time — they were laying the groundwork for a compelling story with extraordinary characterization. And once the plot did start to get moving, I was totally and absolutely hooked — because I deeply cared about the characters.

But yeah, the only way a new reader or viewer can know to stick with it, though, is if a friend or a reviewer clues them into that. It’s one of the things I tried to do with this review. But without that, it’s a leap of faith. It seems like the creators hadn’t earned that from you when you read Sweet Revolution, to which all I can say is, fair enough.