Magen's Reviews > The Gray House

2.5 stars I wanted to love this book and I was incredibly intrigued by the story at first. There were two major problems with the book. First, it was incredibly difficult to keep track of the characters and what house they belonged in. I saw another review mention this, but what she didn't explain is that it is challenging for two reasons: one, the names of some characters change over time but it's rarely explicit and two, time is not linear even when excluding the fantasical time periods. I listened to the audiobook version, which created more problems because 1) the table of names of all the male characters and their houses at the beginning of each part were not read by the narrator and 2) the narrator did a poor job at clearly articulating what was the chapter subtitle, which provided critical information about the speaker and sometimes other important information. The second major problem with this book was that it was too detailed. I love literary fiction and I completely understand how details can create an atmosphere and subtlely that is vital for a deep, symbolic book. However, at some point, this book simply delved too much into the day to day lives of way too many characters. At some point, I lost interest in the book and likely would have stopped reading if I had read it in print. I stuck with it in audiobook format because I didn't spend time on it exclusively anymore and I was interested to see how it all played out. There was enough foreshadowing to indicate it was going to be a climatic end. Unfortunately, the end was rather vague and disappointing. The poor ending is why I rounded down. This was a long book with much left unexplained throughout the book, but having a bit more closure to the ending would have made it worth it. Without that, it's not really clear why one should read this book. I do think I would have liked the book a bit more if I had started reading it in print and thus had better clarity on who was who and how the houses broke down. Yet, I'm less sure I would have stuck with it. At the very least, the audiobook version could be improved by reading all the pages and also by having the reader find some way to help differentiate the narrators in the story, which jump all over the place, including 1st person and 3rd person viewpoints for the same character. If this sounds like something you would be interested in, I think it is worth a shot, but it's not worth it to pick it up if you are on the fence.