I was granted an ARC of this book via NetGalley in return for a fair and honest review. This book is currently available at your local bookseller.
It took me a long time to get through How to Tell Toledo from the Night Sky. Way too long. My ARC copy actually expired before I was able to finish. I never really sunk into this novel. I like it, but I don’t love it. There were just too many things which didn’t align for me to fall in love, like I fell in love with Shine Shine Shine. Let’s see if I can’t figure out why.
As I progressed through the novel I used the status updates on Goodreads to keep track of what I was feeling as I went. About 70 pages in the group of characters finally started to come together and stopped being disparate things. My thought at the time: “I’m wondering how Netzer will bring all the pieces together.” And the problem was that the way they were brought together wasn’t captivating. Ms. Netzer’s approach to novels is to take a familiar trope (boy meets girl) and inject it with a smidge of the fantastical (a turf war between astronomy and astrology and parents engineering soul mates). But the pieces never truly reconciled.
That didn’t stop me from appreciating the characters. By the time I reach page 263 my notes tell me: “now I’m loving these characters and angry at the wasted 50 pages”. The wasted 50 pages I’m think I’m referring to are pages 15-65 or so. In those pages our two protagonists, George and Irene have yet to meet. They are each living independent lives, but most importantly they are living with great big crazy circumstances. And it felt at the time like the novel did just spinning its wheels, attempting to set up the not-real Toledo of the title and the characters inhabit it instead of just progressing with the story. At times throughout the book the reading felt like walking through wet cement. There were demi gods, lucid dreams, crystal balls and black holes. At a certain point it just got to be too much, and robbed the narrative of necessary time.
I had concerns on page 308 (about 90% through the book): “I’m now worried about Netzer landing this one… it’s in too many different types…” This book is many types of books tightly wrapped in less than 350 pages. Each of the genres gets shortchanged. And it’s a shame, because this book could have been 4 or 5 stars. It’s got the bones of one of the most original stories I have read in quite some time. Since the love that George and Irene share was designed and engineered by their mothers even before they were born, as the story unfolds philosophical questions come up. Such as, is it possible to influence people’s actions before they even take them by putting certain things in place before hand? In the case of George and Irene their mothers seem to have taken great pains to encourage them to like the same things, do the same activities all while ensuring they grow up apart, while at the same time hoping that one day they meet and fall in love. This is certainly the basis for a very interesting book, but somehow it How to Tell Toledo from the Night Sky just never lived up to its potential.
But that isn’t to say that Lydia Netzer’s writing style is anything less than beautiful. For example:
“It’s more like every electron in every atom in the universe paused, breathed in deeply, assessed the situation, and then reversed its course, spinning backward, or the other way, which was the right way all along. And afterward, the universe was exactly the same, but infinitely more right.”
Ms. Netzer has also shared with us one of the best quotes I have ever read about the writing and revising process. Her friend Susannah Breslin told her (and Ms. Netzer shared with us in her Author’s note) “If one of your kids had pooped all over the floor, would you stand there complaining about it? No, you would roll up your sleeves and clean it up. So clean it up.” I wish that in cleaning up the drafts of this novel that it had been fleshed out more and that Netzer had chosen a different/better wrap up for George and the demi-gods. And that secondary characters hadn’t fallen off the page in the final 100 pages. I so wanted it to be a 4 or 5 star novel.
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