Welcome to the Speculative Chic Book Club! Each month, we invite you to join us in reading a book that is voted on by YOU, our readers. Following a short review, please feel free to discuss the book in the comments!

The Bone Clocks 
Written by: David Mitchell
Genre: ?????
Pages: 641 (Kindle) 
Publisher: Random House

Premise: 

Following a terrible fight with her mother over her boyfriend, fifteen-year-old Holly Sykes slams the door on her family and her old life. But Holly is no typical teenage runaway: A sensitive child once contacted by voices she knew only as “the radio people,” Holly is a lightning rod for psychic phenomena. Now, as she wanders deeper into the English countryside, visions and coincidences reorder her reality until they assume the aura of a nightmare brought to life.

For Holly has caught the attention of a cabal of dangerous mystics—and their enemies. But her lost weekend is merely the prelude to a shocking disappearance that leaves her family irrevocably scarred. This unsolved mystery will echo through every decade of Holly’s life, affecting all the people Holly loves—even the ones who are not yet born.

A Cambridge scholarship boy grooming himself for wealth and influence, a conflicted father who feels alive only while reporting on the war in Iraq, a middle-aged writer mourning his exile from the bestseller list—all have a part to play in this surreal, invisible war on the margins of our world. From the medieval Swiss Alps to the nineteenth-century Australian bush, from a hotel in Shanghai to a Manhattan townhouse in the near future, their stories come together in moments of everyday grace and extraordinary wonder. 

Rich with character and realms of possibility, The Bone Clocks is a kaleidoscopic novel that begs to be taken apart and put back together by a writer The Washington Post calls “the novelist who’s been showing us the future of fiction.”

Not actually that many spoilers in the discussion this time, but there might be in the comments. 

Discussion: So here’s my confession y’all: despite a lot of effort on my part, I couldn’t get through this book. In fact, according to my Kindle I am precisely 16% of the way through it. So this discussion will be about why I couldn’t get through it, at least not in the allotted time.

I really wanted to like this. Cloud Atlas is one of my favorite films, though I haven’t gotten around to reading the book yet, so this is my first time visiting David Mitchell’s novels. Based on this novel alone, he seems like he’s an author that requires more attention span than I have to offer at this moment in time, and this novel really failed to grip me early on. If the story of Cloud Atlas is anything to go by, there are a lot of moving parts and nothing is really a throwaway, so his stories require a lot of attention I simply don’t have the energy to give right now. It’s a really slow burn of a novel.

One of the problems I had with the first part is the character of Holly in general. She never read like an actual 15 year old girl, she read like a middle aged dude’s impression of a 15 year old girl. I’m not saying you can only write precisely what you know (ahem, Jo March), but a bit more effort would probably have been a good idea. I never really got around to meeting anyone else, I was only a chapter into the second part with the next main character whose name I’ve already forgotten. 

So that’s where we are. I might revisit this in the future, but we’re calling it for now. 

Did any of you make it through?