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Mar 28, 2015gendeg rated this title 3 out of 5 stars
By far, I Am Radar should get points for sheer imaginative storytelling; Larsen brazenly rejects narrative conventions. But ultimately I just tired of the book long before I reached the end. I didn’t rip through this; the story drags and grows tedious in places. Larsen does a remarkable job showing off his love of research, and kudos to him for that, but it’s like he made the novel structure an afterthought, a mere modus operandi for the sake of convenience. As in Larsen’s first novel, The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet, which I enjoyed, this one is full of marginalia, pictures, excerpts, footnote-type facts, but it just never really comes together and gels into a satisfying story arc. (Clocking in at 600 pages, there should be an arc, for goodness sakes!) Reading it was like observing an ice sculpture that you once marveled at momentarily at the beginning, until it all melted and dribbled away and now you have no recollection of its original form.