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I am genuinely mystified at the amount of praise this book is getting. I found the novel practically unreadable. For starters I am totally allergic to fiction written in the present tense but even apart from that it comes across as total fan wankery. Then again no wonder given it was written by Tarantino's biggest fan. Hell, he even featured references to himself as a young boy in it!

Don't even know where to start so just a few small pointers why I reacted so strongly about this one. I certainly wasn't "nodding in the affirmative" (one of Tarantino's many awkward expressions in the book) when I was reading this

The book forsakes plot nearly entirely and just feels like listening in to some geeky bores ramble on and on and on and on about their favourite movies. It's bad enough when this is about real movies but gets worse when we read (but obviously can't see) references to fictitious films. And worst of all, Tarantino, self nominated movie geek Numero Uno, often gets his facts wrong about the real stuff: The "info" about the German Karl May movies e.g. has glaring errors starting from apparently having been filmed in the 1950s when they didn't get made until a decade later.

Every character regardless defines themselves by their love of movies and apparently Cliff even goes as far as having a Top 5 list of favourite Kurosawa films. Defining characters by their interests is always a very lazy way of characterisation but en masse such as here it is total ineptitude. (If he ever gets around to writing a Western novel as threatened I have no doubt it will mainly be an endless list of favourite Lily Langtry songs.)

So he drops the film's raison d'être and (in)famous climax by making this just a tiny reference point very early on in the novel. This of course means that all the scenes with the Manson Family lose any of their meaning but hey, I am willing to forgive that if he had replaced the ending with something new and worthwhile. Instead the final pages are - no spoiler warning as there is nothing of interest to spoil - an endless reading of lines between Rick and the Girl???? Seriously??!!!??? That's it?????

Events in the future (1970s) are told in the conditional or past tense; events in the present (1969) in present tense; events in the past in past tense so with both past and future in the past tense, it's a stylistic nightmare together with the awkward present tense narration.

"If New York is the city that never sleeps, Los Angeles in the middle of the night and early wee hours of the morning turns back into the desert it was before it got paved over with concrete." Sorry, but this kind of stuff hurts both my eyes and ears when I read it aloud and every page if not every paragraph is choke full of dreadful narration.

I could go on endlessly (as Tarantino does) but I've had it with this book. Given that Tarantino is known for films with snappy and succinct dialogue, I am utterly stunned how clumsy this is written in every aspect.