Book review: The Spear Cuts Through Water

On the recommendation of a coworker with excellent taste in books, I read The Spear Cuts Through Water by Simon Jimenez. It took me five pages to get annoyed with the structure (when is the actual story going to start?) and thirty pages to get completely hooked. After that point, I didn't notice the structure anymore. Jimenez dances between worlds, carrying narratives through time and space, leaving the reader feeling like they're sitting alongside the first narrator in the audience of the Inverted Theater.

This book took me ages to read, and I loved every moment of it. Each scene carried so much weight that I was surprised each time I resurfaced from the book to find I'd only gone a couple pages deeper. Or maybe it was the dancing nature of the narrative that made me read more slowly than normal, as I had to hold more pieces of the story in my head to place each scene and narrator.

I've never read anything else like this before, and I want to read more.

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