The West Passage

The West Passage

Bewertung am 04.08.2024
Bewertungsnummer: 2259651
Bewertet: Buch (Gebundene Ausgabe)

If Kafka’s Schloss and Le Guin’s A Wizard of Earthsea had a baby, this would be the deeply strange, slightly cannibalistic, eldritch Lady they would birth. Not much is outright explained in this novel and many questions are left unanswered, but if you’re open to it, and trust in the narrative, The West Passage will introduce you to a fever dream of a world at times wondrous and even beautiful…but mostly violent and horrific. Indeed, the main beauty comes not from the setting itself, which is unforgiving at the best of times, but from the main characters who, in spite of such surroundings, try their best to carve a path of justice and kindness. At its heart, The West Passage is a coming-of-age story, a literal journey through which we get to experience the Palace, a sprawling marvel in decay. It is at times extremely lonely and quite often tragic, but I at least was deeply invested in our protagonists, their quests and, most importantly, the way they both began to question their world. The West Passage is heavy on vibes, episodic, but there is definitely a plot and nearly every time it reared its head it got a gasp out of me. The book might not be for everyone, it’s weird, occasionally gory, and not at all interested in whether you’re able to keep up, but it was exactly my kind of jam.