Review: You
So recently I ran out of books to read (in a way), so I stole a book which my sister had recently bought, called You by Zoran Drvenkar. At first, I found this book really hard to get into and understand, because it’s written in second person, and changes the point of view to a different character pretty often. However, once I figured it all out and it started to come together, I found the book quite interesting.
Looking back on it, I liked the fact that Drvenkar wrote in a way in which it started out with a whole number of separate stories that, as I was reading, slowly came together, and made a whole lotta sense. It was also interesting to read a book which wasn’t by an American author and set in America – it was a nice change to be transported to Germany and such. The writing itself was also pretty good, being translated and all.
I thought that there might’ve been too many different perspectives in the novel, like within the group of five girls, there really didn’t need to be more than two, seeing as their story was almost nearly the same throughout. And I guess the perspective of Marten and maybe even Darian and Mirko weren’t really needed either. But I guess I might just be used to the one continuous story in third (or first) person. Although having a lot of different point of views can get kind of confusing, I think Drvenkar was trying to achieve a greater depth within his story.
The story was quite interesting, but I still kind of felt that there wasn’t really a story at the same time. Like, there was this whole adventure and hype in the lead up to the end, and the end was just nothing I guess. It was kind of anti-climactic in a sense. There was also a point in the book where I was reading and I was like “what the fuck?”, and I felt that that certain part didn’t really need to be in there, I guess it made the story interesting, but I didn’t like it and thought it wasn’t needed.
As for the characters, I thought they were pretty well developed, and each one had a distinctly different personality, which was nice to read about – everyone wasn’t the same and therefore boring. I especially like the character of ‘The Traveler’ and how his story worked out, and the identity reveal in the end. I guess I just wish that we got to read more about him, or about his crimes and the consequences of.
Also I think that the blurb of the novel is very misleading. It talks about this guy coming for ‘you’, but the story wasn’t like that at all. Sure, ‘The Traveler’ was present, but not in the way the blurb insinuated, he wasn’t even a major major character like others were.
