book review: And Then We Came to the End

By Brent:
I wanted to like this book. But I didn't. I thought I was enjoying it for a while; it is clever and well-written. But by about page 100 I was tired of clever and well-written and funny observations about work life. I get it, I'm employed. The major plot themes move too slowly and the book is written in the first person plural ("we") which, for me, meant I never quite got attached to any of the characters. First person plural isn't done much in novels, it's considered very hard. I can see why because even though, as I said, the book was well written, I kept feeling like it was being told from the point of view of a particular person who never let us hear what he or she was thinking. Who is this "we" and why don't "we" ever say what "we're" thinking? And then I realized that, by definition, "we" is all of the characters in the book and I don't like any of them. So I stopped reading the book. There's a middle section (written more conventionally as "she") that was well done and somewhat more engaging. And then I skipped to the end. And the was nice but there's like, 278 pages from where I stopped to the end and I didn't really miss anything. So there you have it. Read 100 pages; skip to page 196 and read for, like, 30 more page, and then read the end. Or just let this book go even though it was highly regarded by reviewers.