A “mid-life crisis novel” for David Mitchell

I have been really terrible about writing book reviews, but I have at least renewed my drive to read more. Mitchell is one of the easiest authors for me to jump into, and The Bone Clocks — which has sat on my shelf unread for over a year now — was a pretty easy read for me. I’ll try to put up the reviews for all the other books I have read before and after this one (I have about four others!)

On to the review!

The best part about The Bone Clocks – besides being able to live in Mitchell’s excellent prose – is that the structure is a variation of what he usually does. His past work are usually epic sagas spanning decades (Clock Atlas, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet) from intersecting points of views that culminate into a general theme; but Bone Clocks focuses on the life of a single person, Holly Sykes, and this is shown through either herself or from people in her life.

The first and final chapters are narrated from Holly’s point of view, while all the years in between are filled in by family, lovers, etc. In that sense, we get to see her go from being a teenager to being an old biddy. We get to compare how she has grown as a person, how she has changed, what she still retains from her old teenage self. This is especially interesting to me because I am someone who subscribes to the belief that we don’t really fundamentally change, but we do grow into a truer – or more corrupted, depending on our lives – version of our selves.

To read the rest of this, go to my blog!