Ka: Dar Oakley in the Ruin of Ymr

Executive Summary: This book wasn't really for me. It's more about the journey than anything else, and I found the journey full of lulls. 2.5 Stars.

Audiobook: I'm generally not a fan of authors reading their own work. I think this story might have been better with a different narrator. Mr. Crowley isn't bad per-say, but his voice is kind of soothing and when the story was slow, it was easy to sort of lose my concentration.

Full Review
There have been a few books whose point is the journey that I've liked, but those are few and far between. This one was OK, but I often found myself bored.

I love the portrayal of the crows, in particular the titular character. However I guess I don't find crow life very exciting. My favorite parts were some of the relationships that Dar Oakely had. In particular I liked his first real relationship with a human.

Often though I found I just didn't really care what he was up to. I think this is one of those books where you'll just love the prose and sort of slice of crow life, or you'll find it mostly boring as I did. Despite being well written, it just wasn't a great fit for me.

Well this was haunting and strange and consuming and basically everything I needed and expected from a new John Crowley novel, written about a crow, read in the darkest days of winter.

“Why,” he asked, “did we come back by the way we did? When it wasn't the way I went in?”
She was looking far off, hand shading her eyes. “You never come out the way you went in,” she said. “And if you go back in again, you never go by the same way.”
“Oh?”
“Because,” she said, “you never do go back anywhere. You only go on.”

“Ymr,” Dar Oakley said. “It's the realm where what People think is true is true.”
She laughed. “There is no true,” she said. “Only what happened, after it has.”

“One day like me you'll begin to die for good, no matter how long it takes before you do. You'll live so long you'll think your life's forever, and you'll call it forever, but it's not. You'll see.”
“I don't care,” he said. He was beside her, with her, and he felt as deathless as any youth. “It's enough.”
“Can you have enough life?” she said.
“You can't have more.” He came to groom her, took the feathers of her head in his bill one by one. “Not more than all.”