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Title: a post-apocalyptic yawner
Review: Despite the author's accomplished prose style and vivid imagination, this is, in the end, a very boring book about a setting and a theme which should be fascinating: surviving the--or at least an--apocalypse. The problem is that the author remains at such an abstract and intellectual level throughout most of the book. As a result, you don't fully enter into the narrator's world, and you don't really get to know the characters. There is a scene about 30 pages from the end, when some peddlers come selling water in buckets, and there's a fight over the water, when I found myself saying, "Yes--this is exactly the kind of engaging detail that has been missing from most of this story!" The ambiguities of the cat-dog character and the wall-as-conduit-to-alternate-reality do not make up for this fundamental shortcoming.
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