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Codex by Lev Grossman
Codex by Lev GrossmanMy rating: 2 of 5 stars
Young investment banker gets caught up in the search for a medieval manuscript that may or may not exist.
Ouch, this is not good. It's what appears to be Grossman's default protagonist: young white New Yorker dude who is deeply confused that his enormous privilege doesn't translate automatically to happiness. But his later fantasies have so much more muscle and richness to them. This thriller, by comparison, thumps blandly along to its dull conclusion.
That's actually one of the saddest things about this book. It flirts with the fantastical around the edges, but then withdraws to the banal with what looks like a failure of courage. The protagonist plays a computer game, whose scenes and convolutions begin to parallel the quest plot in eerie and inexplicable ways. Inexplicable until explained, anyway, and not to get too psychological about this because I don't like doing that. But man. There is a fantasy novel strangled to death inside this rigid thriller, and it's kind of terrible to watch it happen.
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