The writing style didn't really work for me, which is why I stopped reading this novel quite soon after starting.

It's hard to review something that elicits a hearty, "Girl, WUT?" about 5 pages in; I don't want to recommend a hard pass just because this style was seriously not for me, as my hot mess could be another's solid masterpiece. In any case, this walks a fine line between experimentation and impossibleness and veers too far one too many times. Take your chances, I guess, because what harm can reading a book that doesn't know what it is do?

Hmmmm.... Not sure how I feel about this one. I read it in the days following Hurricane María when the island was ravaged, there was no electricity, no running water, empty supermarket shelves with no drinking water, and ridiculous gasoline lines. Escaping to a utopia seemed nice, even knowing that things were not going to be as idyllic as they first seemed.

A few pages in my English-teacher brain was extremely uncomfortable. What was going on with the punctuation in this book? Who was this editor that did not rein some of these words in? Ultimately these peanut gallery interruptions--and perhaps my post-apocalyptic lifestyle--hindered my enjoyment of this book. Maybe under different circumstances I would have found it quirky... or even understood why these choices were made. Unfortunately, that was not the case.

I found this book confounding, to be honest. I enjoy silliness and science fiction but I couldn't get into the spirit, and ultimately could not finish. It was well-written, but I just... couldn't follow.

Unfortunately I am not writing a full review as this was just not the book for me. I've attempted to read the first 100 pages multiple times and just can not get into it - it felt as though it was moving sooo slowly -and the footnotes certainly did not help.

<<"Death is, in a sense. Perfect. Final, finished and irretrievably complete."
"Then let us strive for imperfection.">>

This book was very hard to read. I do not know if it is because I am not fluent in English or just because the way it was written. There are commas in strange places and way to few periods. This made the book hard for me, there was no flow in the language and it took me a long time to ignore the commas and periods.

An other thing that confused me was the way the story was told. There are to many breaks in the story, making me lose the story line more than once. The knowledge chapters could me baked into the text in an other way, making it more a part of the story. The way it is written now made me irritated when those chapters showed up, and I did not understand what it had to do with the story.

The story line on the other hand had a lot of potential! I enjoyed the story about Rosa, and that is why I give the book 2 stars instead of one. I just wish the author had spent some more time on the book, because now it just feels incomplete. It feels like a lot of ideas not jet baked together to a book.

Sandra Hodgkinson (and for that matter, Rosa - the protagonist) is a woman who appears to very much enjoy the sound of her own voice. Her style of writing was described as “Dickensian but not in a good way” by my boyfriend after I read him a sentence in the hope that saying it out loud would fix the very awkward commas that actually confused the sentence completely (it didn’t work). By the time I reached the 6% mark on my Kindle PDF, we were already on footnote number 29. These footnotes did not let up throughout the entirety of the book. Often there would be multiple to a (quite small) page, or even in the same sentence. The final 20% segment of the file was reserved solely for these 280 footnotes. 

Now, I like footnotes. I love footnotes. They’re something I especially like about Pratchett novels. The difference, though, is that every Pratchett footnote feels necessary. In my opinion, a large portion of Hodgkinson’s footnotes could have been removed without detriment to the novel, and therefore should have been. 

A combination of the footnotes and the style of Hodgkinson’s writing leaves the book coming across more as a history lesson that starts off quite interesting and then starts to drag 40% of the way through when you realise absolutely nothing has happened. (Incidentally, that’s the point I nearly DNF’d this one and only continued due to a mix of hope that something/anything would happen and a sense of commitment.)

The story is told through history snippets and the narration of Rosa and Connor (he narrates maybe 4 sections and seems somewhat unnecessary). Connor is the only reprieve from Hodgkinson’s style, but unfortunately this makes him come across as weak and young.

The world feels realistic but I’m left with the sense that I’m missing an entire section of plot. The end is very rushed, more like the last few chapters of a multi-book series that the end of a dragging novel.

There are bones of potential here, but ultimately A Lack of Consensus on the ‘H’ Word falls short of the mark.