Martyr!: The Instant New York Times Bestseller

Diese Geschichte ist in meinen Kopf eingezogen und wird ihn wohl nicht so schnell wieder verlassen Okay, wahrscheinlich nie

I was very excited for this novel because many critics hailed this the “book you have to read this year!” A while back I had decided to stay away from current publications because time and time again, I was disappointed by texts that had been hyped and praised. Now I tried again and…well, I am quite disappointed again. This novel never managed to draw me in. I never started caring for any of the characters because they all feel distant, flat, often too constructed and thus inauthentic. There are quite a few instances in which a character acts or speaks in a highly dramatic fashion but that drama never feels natural or fitting. On a structural level, this novel is not really noteworthy. The author tries to present different voices in the many chapters of this text but these voices all feel the same - unison. As for the thing I have read most praise about, the language, I do not see what other people apparently see in this novel. It is the debut novel of a poet and many critics conclude that this shows, that despite some flaws, the language used in this novel is poetic and beautiful and so on. Quite frankly, I do not see it. Sure, there are some good passages / sentences here and there but nothing ever really stands out. I was never “wowed”. Often the poetic language was part of the drama that I have mentioned above. But as such, it felt cheap and unoriginal. Too many paragraphs in this novel end with forced similes, which follow the same structure: end of a sentence/paragraph + comma + “like…”. It actually became annoying. Finally, I feel that this novel was published too early. It feels unfinished, not fleshed out and would have needed some extra work. It does absolutely not justify the hype.