bookstacled.’s Reviews > Everything the Light Touches > Status Update

This has been standing on my way of getting back to other books so decided to get done with it. Safe to say I'm not a fan of the novel, so heads up that my review is not gonna be very cheerful.

I've come to point of questioning myself as to why I read fiction. This book clearly doesn't have a story. When a book is likened to too many books, all famous and award winning, chances are that it's trying to be too many things at once. The one story I was getting interested in hasn't come back yet so I'll speed read the rest so that I can finish it somehow.

I'm hopelessly LOST in this book and NOT in a good way. Almost halfway in, after a painstakingly boring long description of Goethe's life and his attraction to married women (specifically ones that are way out of his league lol), we get a "poetic(?)" sorta account from Carl Linnaeus. If you don't remember your highschool biology, he was the one who formalised binomial nomenclature, and father of taxonomy.

Why would I read a fiction to know what happened in Goethe's life if he himself has written more than plenty? What's the point of this even.

And now we get an entire chapter from Goethe? Really didn't need ugh.

I have no clue what the author is about to do with all these characters across time and space traveling. Every time it gets interesting, the chapter ends. I really hope it is going somewhere. I'm tempted to read reviews at this point lol.

Do we need this much Goethe jargon? The story was getting interesting with the botany banter between Miss Alexander and Mr. Finlay, but then a random flashback just endless discussion on Goethe and his aesthetic criticism. I love an enjoyable academic jargon in fiction but it shouldn't be this dry and unending.

I didn't know screw pine is what we call "kaitha" in Malayalam but Evie the MC was talking about what seemed stilt roots so I made the guess. Whatever I know of botany is almost entirely in Malayalam. Idk if stilt roots weren't named when the story was set or simply she was against the name as she's against the idea of classification and categorisation of plant parts.

It feels like I've started an entirely new story with a similar protagonist from a very different setting. Hope this is going somewhere. The previous chapter was about hundred or so pages and I was really into it when it ended literally mid sentence.

Back in Delhi, I’d tell Grace that I was a bit like Uranus.
“What?” She’d blink at me.
Uranus, the planet with the unfortunate name. Unlike the other planets in our solar system, I’d explain, spinning quietly in the same plane as their orbit, magnetic fields running primly perpendicular, Uranus tumbled around on its side, its orientation changing in all sorts of directions. Often, I felt the same.

I mostly don't post a book when I have only just started reading, but this kinda felt like the right choice after Firekeeper's Daughter. A nice walk in the woods, a lot of science, a piece of life that's detached from the "mainland". In Firekeeper's Daughter it was Sugar Island, while this book has Shillong. North East is beautiful. To a southie me, NE feels strangely home despite all the cultural differences.