Very early into this book I realized I was going to have to develop a strategy to get through it. The author's writing style of extreme run-on sentences, little punctuation (except dashes, there are oh-so-many dashes) and no quotation marks whatsoever seems to be in style at the moment but it is not a favourite of mine. So, my strategy was to speed read the book; to go as fast as I possibly could so I did not get tripped up by the long, long, long sentences and the multiple dashes in each, and to just try to focus on the content. Although I found most of the characters quite stunted the story was fairly good and the recurring themes of loss, grief and abandonment were well done and, for me, satisfactorily redeemed.