"The Rib King" has that quality which good literature has. The kind that sucks you into the story and keeps you inside of it until it's ended, and, if truly great, stays with you for long after. The speed and ease with which Hubbard made me care for her two leading characters and the emerging story was impressive. It usually takes more than one chapter for an author to sell me on a character, but that's all it took for me to start to really care for Sitwell.
~vague spoilers~
The story takes a dramatic turn about halfway in. I felt it was subtly built up to, and then better explained in the second half. Honestly I was on board with whatever the story threw me, I just wanted to know how things would unfold. Which is why... the ending was such a let down. The climax happens on literally the third-to-last page. I was reading along enraptured because I trusted this book to have an ending that lived up to the rest of it, but what I got was something that was unquestionably rushed. Wrapped up in less than three pages. It was like reading a few paragraphs summarizing an ending, not a true ending.
I'm not so disappointed that it undoes the achievement of the previous 360-some pages, but... I feel like this could have been not just a good book, but an amazing one.
~vague spoilers~
The story takes a dramatic turn about halfway in. I felt it was subtly built up to, and then better explained in the second half. Honestly I was on board with whatever the story threw me, I just wanted to know how things would unfold. Which is why... the ending was such a let down. The climax happens on literally the third-to-last page. I was reading along enraptured because I trusted this book to have an ending that lived up to the rest of it, but what I got was something that was unquestionably rushed. Wrapped up in less than three pages. It was like reading a few paragraphs summarizing an ending, not a true ending.
I'm not so disappointed that it undoes the achievement of the previous 360-some pages, but... I feel like this could have been not just a good book, but an amazing one.