Special thanks to NetGalley and Kensington Books | Erewhon Books for the ARC copy they provided.
Picking up One Hundred Shadows for the first time, I was not expecting the style of the writing. Part of me is never prepared for the lack of quotation marks around spoken dialog, or the lack of dialog tags. For perhaps the first half page, the style felt off putting. Then I got lost in the story and couldn’t care less about the style. After encountering Eungyo, the main character, and her shadow and Mujae, Eungyo’s counterpart and love interest, One Hundred Shadows carried me away.
It carried me away to the point I barely noticed the speed with which I was reading this book. In the space of twenty-four hours, Eungyo and Mujae had shown me their whole world and moved on out of my sight when the pages ran out, and I was left wanting more. One Hundred Shadows begins in the midst of a story, and ends the same, the way life does. It is a perfect snippet in time, and I am here, days after completing my read, still wanting more.
I won’t get it and that is the point, but the want is still there.
And that desire for more is what a good book should leave a reader with. A whole story, with no “beginning” and no “end” that still has the capacity to linger in the mind, niggling that there is something more.
One Hundred Shadows is beautifully written and beautifully crafted and I recommend it wholeheartedly.
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