Gardens of the Moon

It feels like you're starting the book in the middle of the story. The characters and places are not properly introduced and there is no attempt to make you care about them. They also all sounded the same. Before you kill someone or destroy some city, make us care about them.

The author clearly have a message to transmit, a big world with a meaningful story. He just does not present them in a readable way. The whole thing is a mess of poorly constructed stories, with no cohesion and no reason to be emotionally interested in them.

Annoying features of the book
- Prologue: they can be interesting and might help to set up the mood of the book. I've seen prologues more interesting then the whole book by a wide margin, thus a misleading way to start the story. Then there is the ones that feels like an excuse to tell a bad short tale, one where you don't have to worry about describing your characters, nor to make sense for the reader, because it is assumed that after reading the book you might have a clue about the importance of what just happened. This prologue falls into the second category.
- Excerpts of other books: each chapter starts with a citation of a supposedly famous book inside the fictional world. Another mood setting tool I believe, again this sometimes might work. It did not work for me in this book, they were too long and boring like a history textbook excerpt. Or just a senseless poem.
- Start with a side-story: and if the preface, maps, list of characters, epigraph, lament (whatever that is) wasn't enough to NOT start the story, the first chapter doesn't do it either.
- Lots of thrown in proper names and/or made up words.

Reading other comments, people tend to agree with my opinion. The book starts slow, bad, confusing, the prose is not great, there are problems with his exposition. However despite of that, he gets 5 stars because if you manage to get pass that, you are rewarded with a deep, complex and satisfying story.

My favorite comments:

“The book is not well written; specifically, it is bad prose written by someone who is very intelligent, but lacks an ear for poetry, or in fact, language in general ... the sentences are disjointed in a kind of technical way that often left me rereading them because I had somehow missed the sense in them as I grappled with their structure.”
Ben

“... There's no story to speak of... it is just a collection of scenes and events that occur in the same “world”. None of it makes sense...“
Becky

Read 13% 3:17/26:03