The Need

I had really high expectations from the reviews but found the book to be good/fine. The writing was really beautiful/primal/visceral in a lot of places and the story had a lot of promise from the beginning, but it went in a direction I found sort of trite and unimaginative, and I was pretty bored by about 1/3 of the way in. If I had expected the book to be a fable I would have been more impressed, it's a very compact and beautiful retelling of an old biblical tale. I just wouldn't call it fantasy or weird fiction or anything that implies originality in the plot, which is what it was sold to me as.