A DNF for me
I was a little apprehensive starting Prophet - at 480 pages it's a bit of a beast. I tend not to request longer books, as anything over 400 pages usually merit the criticism 'they could have cut at least 100 pages out of it' from me! Unless it's a fantasy epic, tell me a story and keep it concise!
Prophet unfortunately was no exception to this, and I DNFd it at 27% or page 131. The premise is quite interesting - a substance which brings to life your happiest memory and uses it as a weapon against you. Main character Rao, who can always tell a truth from a lie and Adam, a no-personality military brute, are tasked with finding out what's going on. After 131 pages that's all I really got from the book and what is there could easily have been condensed into a few chapters. There's too much superfluous dialogue and nothing really moves the plots on.
The chapters alternate between the present-day timeline, a past timeline of when Rao and Adam started working together and an unlabelled flashback of a character's childhood. I'm sure these come together at some point to make a satisfying connection but at the outset it just broke up the main storyline with more dialogue that also didn't move the plot forward. I read some reviews that mentioned that the pace and interest dipped a lot in the middle, and at 130 pages I was very aware I still had many pages to go before it was likely to get interesting. As I was struggling to find the motivation to keep picking it up, I bowed out of this particular story.
Overall, although the premise is interesting, the pacing is slow and at almost a third in, I didn't feel engaged or interested in the book to keep reading. Thank you to NetGalley, Random House UK, Vintage & Jonathan Cape for the chance to read the ARC in exchange for an honest review.
