E-Wen’s Reviews > There Are Rivers in the Sky > Status Update

Painfully explanatory and tiresomely flat

Shafak conflates thematic wisdoms and her characters' revelations; her adagial writing style makes an at best awkward and at worst pretentious read which forces profundity on you through often unbearably pithy interjections in her narrative prose. She maintains a suffocating chokehold on her metaphors and symbols that tie each of the three stories together, force-feeding them to readers.