Review: Meandering Mystery
Rating: 3 out of 5
Date: 07 8, 2014
Rain girl is a meandering mystery, long on poetic observations and short on substance. While many reviewers are blaming the translation, I actually liked the word choices and I thought the prose flowed well. My problems arose from the overall story, which has nothing to do with the translator.There are a lot of characters, most of them minor, moving in and out throughout short chapters. This makes it a hard book to put down and come back to. I read it in one day, and even then I was forgetting who certain people were and how they pertained to the issue at hand.The tone of the book feels philosophical, and that aspect is sometimes overdone. The writing has a tendency to feel weighty and introspective, more suited to drama than mystery/suspense.The characters, in a way, are difficult for me to judge. Being an Austrian book, some of my issues could be attributed to a difference in culture. Still, the characters did a lot of talking about trivial things but very little talking about important things. I don't want to give spoilers, so I'll just say that a lot of dangling threads needed to be pulled.The story is wrapped up with an open-ended non-ending. This is an intentional choice by the author, but it has an incomplete feel for me. While leaving something for the reader to decide is fine, too many unanswered questions makes the book feel unfinished.Overall, I neither loved nor hated this story. It's like a person I met but learned nothing about. The impact is small and forgettable.