Motheater by Linda H. Codega

Book Fort Rating: 3 stars

Is it building the book fort? Not my fort... but maybe Nicky's?

I want to write this review as objectively as possible as someone that (I believe) is not the target audience for Motheater. Although it has been tagged as a fantasy novel, I felt it had more in common with literary fiction than traditional fantasy - magical realism, perhaps. Perhaps because of this, and my lack of experience reading this genre, I had a hard time parsing out what the author was trying to convey to me. I read a political think piece (which I greatly appreciate - this pulled my rating up from two stars) on environmentalism but could not comprehend why the two main characters continued to interact with one another after Bennie had such polarising, disturbed views about Motheater at the beginning. 

It was also quite a repetitive book, honing in on making the same point over and over that I found myself feeling confused and searching for a secret meaning in the repetition (there wasn't one) because I assumed the author must have been doing this intentionally. I mark this down as the writing style being a miss for me - I observe that others have responded well to it and greatly enjoyed it, so this is a personal preference.

At the end of the day, I personally didn't enjoy it, but I believe others will if they like litfic with a dash of horror. It's an ambitious debut that has a lot to offer its readers.

Thank you to Netgalley, Kensington Publishing, and Linda H. Codega for this eARC in exchange for an honest review.