Fates and Furies is yet another work of literary fiction with a dramatic amount of metaphor and flowery language. This is a heavy book with a wide variety of twists and turns and themes relating to belonging and loneliness. I definitely recommend it, but it drags on at times in a flurry of pretense.

I had an idea for a book that I thought would be interesting. Tell the story of a relationship between two people in two books, one from each perspective. I thought the retelling of the same events from the two sides would be fascinating. Turns out that this book is essentially just that, although not quite exactly how I intended. It is more about two different ways of viewing the world in general which just happens to be embodied by a husband and wife.

My main problems with this book revolved around my revulsion of most of the characters as well as the overuse of descriptive language. I hated all of the characters at one point or another. They were either unbelievable, annoying, or just plain bad. They had their moments, and as a whole, they fit together, but I still found it hard at times to read because I did not feel for them. The other big issue relating to the literary style of the book is common among literary fiction. There is a fine line between compelling metaphor and an ostentatious display. Now the big issue with complaining about this is that depending on your vocabulary you will complain about such issues sooner or later. One who has no depth to their vocabulary will often complain sooner that a book is being to showy, trying to overuse the thesaurus. On the other hand, one with an extensive vocabulary will usually only complain if the words are used incorrectly or if the writing feels off, but they will nonetheless complain less about the use of language. My vocabulary is somewhere in the middle, I look up a lot of words while I am reading. I still feel that a fair amount of this book was extraneous, meant only to show off or lengthen the novel for some reason. There was some great imagery, and some great phrasing, but in the end I was annoyed a little too often and it took away from my enjoyment.