Rosewater (The Wormwood Trilogy, #1)
by Tade Thompson
An alien lands on Earth, burrows into the ground and presents as a illuminated dome. A shanty town develops around it. Eventually there is a opening through which something escapes and heals people. A city called Rosewater springs up around the alien dome, benefitting from these regular healings.
We follow Kaaro, a „sensitive“, in the employ of some shady secret agency. His life story is told in three separate timelines, set around the biodome. The three timelines felt aimless, without purpose and never came together in a satisfying way for me. The author frequently lost me with all those jumps.
Kaaro is a thief, he is sexist, he feels like a clueless, self-centered, mysoginistic idiot to me. He is not interested in anything and meanders around aimlessly, propelled by others.
The trilogy is called „Wormwood Trilogy“. This nagged at me, so I googled it. Aha! Look for yourself, I am not telling… Suffice to say, this went in the direction I expected. And it also didn‘t. The ending felt anticlimactic.
I can appreciate the inventive world building, but the rest was a slog. The whole thing felt pretty pointless to me and I actively disliked Kaaro and especially his weird obsession with sex and his various orgasms. It was slightly disturbing and off-putting.
I was mostly bored and heavily skimmed the last third of the book.
As the book won various awards and many of my friends liked it, I can only assume that I read this wrong. I will definitely not read the other two books of this trilogy and will also not recommend this to anybody. However, I did like something else by the author, The Murders of Molly Southbourne. Also disturbing, but with pacing and plot that were more my thing. Not an enjoyable main character either though.
Cathy's Reading Bonanza 