On The Calculation Of Volume I - Solvej Balle
I've been putting off reading this book purely because people keep telling me how incredible it is, and for some reason my brain hates me and immediately loses interest in things if people keep bringing them up to me.
In the end I think that perhaps people oversold how good this is - or else I went into it with very high expectations that it struggled to match up to. That's not to say that this isn't good - I definitely enjoyed it and am glad I read it - but it's not the masterpiece it's been made out to be. I'm also not entirely sure how this will be stretched out into multiple volumes, though I think I'm willing to give the second book in the series a go.
The writing is very good and this is an interesting take on the Groundhog Day story. I particularly like the 'puzzle' (for lack of a better word) of which actions Tara takes persist through iterations of the day, and I liked the moments where her husband tried to stay awake through the night with her and how the day reset. Unfortunately the main problem here - both ironic and unsurprising for a story about a day repeating over and over again - is that I found this a little repetitive. Tara sees the same things, repeats the same thoughts and observations, goes over and over the same worries and attempts to find a solution in her mind. It's completely understandable, and I suspect that the sense of tedious, frustrating repetition this creates is by design, but I found it got a little dull in the middle of the book.
The trade-off here is that this is very short, so I was only growing bored rather than fully bored before things started to pick up again, but on the other hand I don't particularly want to be bored when I'm reading, and especially not when I'm reading a book that's shorter than 200 pages long.
Overall I did enjoy this and I think I'd join the crowds of people happily recommending it. I'm not entirely sure how this is going to stretch out to 6 or more volumes, but I'll happily give book 2 a chance and see how I get on with it.