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1.5/5 stars

The concept of this book is genius: an “old classic�� from a mysterious author is studied by two people who converse to each other through margin notes, and along the story secrets are revealed and the mystery behind the infamous V.M. Straka is revealed.

When I picked this book up I was extremely excited to read it since it was a totally novel concept that I had never seen before and promised tons of interesting details and intrigue. However as I went on I realized that all those promises weren’t being fulfilled in a satisfying way as one would have been led to believe.

I’ll explain all the aspects that made me have this opinion about the book:

1) THE WRITING: the way it’s written is quite particular, and while it is very intriguing, it takes a while to figure out your way to read it. There’s no right way to go about it but I kept changing my method. First I tried reading the actual text and margin notes page by page as with a regular book, but that seemed to be slowing me down. Some people decide to read the entire book within the book first then go back to the margin notes and color by color, but to me that takes away from all the immersion of the text and it’s quite impossible not to peek at some of the notes and wonder what’s actually going on in the margin story. Then I started reading a chapter of text then coming back to read the margin notes, and that’s when it hit me: the margin notes aren’t all that interesting on their own and get extremely repetitive or too scrambled to understand how the characters came up with solutions to the many mysteries. In other words, the margin notes didn’t have a nice middle ground between mysterious and straight forward. It was either the two character talking about something very confusing that would take at least a couple reads to understand, or they introduced a question and answered it in the blandest way possible. That leads into...

2) THE INTRIGUE AND MYSTERY: I’m gonna he honest here, I went in expecting a huge amount of plot twists. As with found footage movies, the reader happens to find a book containing the investigation that two people did together, and you wonder what happened to them in the end. Without really saying what happens, I’ll simply say that all the danger that seems to be built up in the margins story ends with “and they just lived happily ever after... (or did they?)�� and all the things you would expect to pay off don’t. In the end the central theme of the text is “the journey is what matter and live is the most important thing�� which is a cliche and could be done well, but is extremely bland in here.

3) LOTS OF PROMISES, NO PAYOFF: I feel like I’m repeating myself here but that’s exactly what the book does sometimes so I don’t care. This book sets up way too many things and sets you up for a huge plot twist right off the bat. Without spoiling it, the editor’s note at the beginning alone is the perfect example of all the promises the book makes to the reader like: No one knows who Straka is and there’s a plethora of theories around - by the end of this the characters in the margins will have figured it out (which they do and it’s literally just a guy), there’s all these authors who can be him and they’re connected somehow (we kinda find out who they are but the back and forth and irregular nature of the margin notes makes it impossible to remember who’s who, who did what, and who betrayed who, who died when, etc), and the margin notes are also in different colours, suggesting the different stages in the characters lives, so you’d assume that some interesting plot points would happen as the colours change (hint, it doesn’t happen).

Also an example to what I mean about set up and no payoff is this (spoilers but not really since it ends up as nothing anyways) at some point in the book the two margin characters notice that a third person wrote the mysterious S symbol in the page and get a little freaked out about who did it but no other comments after. Fast forward to literally the end of the book and they have an exchange like this: “remember that weird S?�� “Oh yeah we still don’t know who did it�� “it was probably just some kid�� “works for me�� that’s almost literally what happens. Are we just gonna forget about that? Or the time they kept hinting at the fires and Serin and the New S or whatever the fuck they were called and how they were dangerous people after (what exactly??) something and the margin characters were in something deeper than they imagined? Well the book kinda forgot about all this and it was just a bunch of nothing.

4) THE PUZZLES AND INSERTS: so many inserts. Some were quite interesting like the letters and the postal cards and napkins. All the rest was annoying and rather useless in my opinion. The two margin characters figure out the codes in the text on their own or say that they don’t know what to do, so why does it seem like we are expected to try solving the codes as well? The book gives you no hints as to whether or not you’re supposed to solve the puzzles or not, and if you were it gives you no easy way of figuring out. I STILL DONT KNOW WHAT THE FUCKING CODE WHEEL WAS FOR!!!

I wouldn’t recommend this book because it most likely will disappoint anyone who is looking for a good mystery story, or who is intrigued by the interesting writing style, because those two things don’t pay off in the end and get really boring in the middle and overall this book just feels like a chore and even after you start trying to get immersive with the puzzles or the different ways of reading you just kinda give up because the story doesn’t get any more interesting and you’re never paid off for your effort of reading this clusterfuck of a book