The Cepalopod Coffeehouse - The Bone Clocks

Welcome to another edition of the Cephalopod Coffeehouse. The idea is simple: on the last Friday of each month, post about the best book you've finished over the past month while visiting other bloggers doing the same.  In this way, we'll all have the opportunity to share our thoughts with other enthusiastic readers.

This month I'm going to tell you about The Bone Clocks by David Mitchell.

 From Amazon: Following a terrible fight with her mother over her boyfriend, fifteen-year-old Holly Sykes slams the door on her family and her old life. But Holly is no typical teenage runaway: A sensitive child once contacted by voices she knew only as “the radio people,” Holly is a lightning rod for psychic phenomena. Now, as she wanders deeper into the English countryside, visions and coincidences reorder her reality until they assume the aura of a nightmare brought to life.

For Holly has caught the attention of a cabal of dangerous mystics—and their enemies. But her lost weekend is merely the prelude to a shocking disappearance that leaves her family irrevocably scarred. This unsolved mystery will echo through every decade of Holly’s life, affecting all the people Holly loves—even the ones who are not yet born.

A Cambridge scholarship boy grooming himself for wealth and influence, a conflicted father who feels alive only while reporting on the war in Iraq, a middle-aged writer mourning his exile from the bestseller list—all have a part to play in this surreal, invisible war on the margins of our world. From the medieval Swiss Alps to the nineteenth-century Australian bush, from a hotel in Shanghai to a Manhattan townhouse in the near future, their stories come together in moments of everyday grace and extraordinary wonder.

This book was a New York Times Bestseller, Longlisted for the Man Booker Prize, Named one of the top ten fiction books of the year, Winner of the World Fantasy Award and Named to more than 29 year-end best of lists.

I, however, am going to buck the trend, and disagree with them all for my usual reason: characters I didn't care about. It's a good thing this book started with Holly Sykes because I might not have finished it otherwise. I loved Holly. I didn't much care for Brubeck the reporter, I definitely didn't like Hugo Lamb who was seemingly only out for the buck, and Crispin Hershey, the writer, was a jerk. If there had been more of Holly and the 'radio people' I think I would've liked this book a lot better but I didn't give a hoot about what happened to those other characters. They just weren't likeable enough for me to care.

I would love to hear what anyone else thought of this book if they've read it.

And for those of you participating in A-Z...you're almost to the finish line : )