I did not finish this book. I really wanted to like it--the cover and book description made the book sounds wonderful and I was excited to read it, but the writing style was not my thing. Also, the main character wasn't my cup of tea either.

Wonderfully intelligent, nuanced, and original. A fierce new voice in fiction.

It feels mean spirited to provide a bad review for a book that, in both style and execution, is just not for me. Look, I was drawn in by the Wes Anderson inspired cover and the synopsis checked a whole bunch of boxes (museums! mystery! mysterious maps in musuems!), so one should not be ashamed for falling for a pretty, pretty package. The novel itself, however, is overly self-aware and the writing style is near impossible to wade through. It reminded me of Miranda July, whose writing is always a hard pass for me. Soooo, if you like Ms. July I think you'll enjoy Ms. Ives? A solid "No thank you" for me.

What a quirky little book this is! It's has a little bit of everything. Intrigue, suspense, and romance gone wrong. Stella Krakus is a soon to be ex wife and curator at the Central Museum of Art in Manhattan. She has a lot going on in life. Her ex is stalking her, her co-worker has gone missing and she might be in a weird office romance.

When she finds a mysterious map is when everything gets even more complicated. She's about to embark on an adventure where she may not be fully prepared for.

A truly enjoyable read with lots of fun little twists throughout the book.

WAY too much unneeded description of everything. I could only stand 15% before closing this book. I won't be going back to it. Reading a book should be entertaining, not agony.

I really wanted to like this book, but it was just impossible for me.

Thanks to Penguin Group and Net Galley for providing me with a free e-galley in exchange for an honest, unbiased review.

Curator Stella Krakus is having a rough week. A colleague is missing, her soon to be exhusband is stalking her, her new romance is hitting the rocks, and did I mention that she's unwittingly in a viral video?! Well, if it's not one thing its your mother and her mother Caro is a piece of work all on her own. With all the strange happenings how will Stella stay sane and not get any more neurotic?

I got this book in May, but didn't start reading it until a couple weeks ago. Unfortunately, I found this book very hard to read. The sentences seemed confusing and were hard to follow. Part of it had to do with the vocabulary. If you are not familiar with advanced art and history terms, just the wording can throw you off and that is where I got lost. I tried to stick it out but had to stop reading.

.. And you thought you were having a bad day. I found the overall voice a bit too full of itself, but it was a good fussy, a comical fussy, and even at times endearing. I would recommend this to a certain person, and honestly, I think that is what the author was going for. I look forward to more by Lucy!

This book sounded right up my alley but I just could not get into it. The writing style was so difficult to follow that I am giving up and calling it done. I will not be posting a link to a review since I did not finish the book.

Not my cup of tea, but I can see why others love it. The prose was a little too descriptive for me and I ached to get to the meat of the story.

I'm sorry, but I lost interest in this novel! I don't think it would be fair for me to review it, since I am no longer interested in it.

IMPOSSIBLE VIEWS OF THE WORLD by Lucy Ives is a fictional first person narrative of Stella Krakus, a curator at a famous museum in Manhattan, who is struggling to find out who she really is and what she really wants. A fellow employee dies, sparking a scavenger hunt throughout the museum and beyond, including some ties to her own family she never knew. This scavenger hunt and how the people close to her help and/or don't help provides Stella the clarity in what she wants and where she wants to be.
Ives' ability to create a flawed and attractive character in Stella Krakus was well done. Her desire to find purpose in her life mirrors most people's search for a reason to exist in the world. The cast of characters around Stella all have flaws, which Stella is happy to point out and at the same time she seems to reluctantly release positive characteristics about them. Stella stumbles upon stories and inferences of a mythical Utopian settlement, which drives the book, but all of the parcels of information quickly become layered and complicated. Deciphering all of that, coupled with museum inner workings a layman doesn't necessarily know makes it hard for the reader to follow at times. A pleasing ending finds Stella discovering truths about herself and the answers to mythical utopia search she so earnestly desired to know.
IMPOSSIBLE VIEWS OF THE WORLD was thought provoking and heartfelt. Whether its looking for answers about some place or about one's self and those around them, all readers can relate to Stella and her endeavors to find her own legitimacy.

Well…that was a letdown. I had such high hopes for this book also. I loved the synopsis of it on NetGalley and couldn’t wait to dive into it. The book was pretty good I kept waiting for THE BIG THING to happen and I clicked on my Kindle and.THE END.

I at first thought maybe my copy was missing a few pages, but a quick check on GoodReads and nope that was truly the end of the book. O.K

I now can’t decide if I liked it or if I am pissed cause it didn’t end the way I felt it should. I mean I am not the author, so I dont have any say in how it ends, but I did feel that the secret that was revealed was..lackluster. I wanted SCANDALS and ACTION and all of that. Instead, all I got was a divorce and an affair.

Looking back I realize that this is more of how the main protagonist grows. It is a character story more than it is a plot driven story. I dont have a problem with that, but I went into this with an expectation of something more so that makes me somewhat grumpy that I did not get it.

As a character study though it was excellent. We see how Stella grows and changes throughout the novel. The book goes deep into her psyche, so we are in her head the whole time. There were times I thought she was dumb but we have all been in her shoes including myself. She was perfectly flawed as we all are. I found that I could relate to her. I have never been through a divorce but I HAVE been on the losing side of unrequited love, and I found myself nodding my head and going I am glad it wasn’t just me that was so blind even though it was only a fictional person that I was relating to. It is amazing how stories even fictional ones can make us feel less alone.

Again there was nothing I did not NOT like about the book I was just expecting more from it as the synopsis made it seem that more would happen and it did not. I think if I had lower expectations or knew that this was more of a character study then I may have finished it with different feelings.

I really wanted to like this novel about an art museum in New York - it seemed to have all of my favourite literary ingredients, but instead I found the story confusing and the dialogue disjointed. The characters were quirky but it didn't all come together. I think the writing style has a lot of potential though.

DNF. I tried, and I tried, and I tried, I really did. But I just could not finish this book.

I read an excerpt before I started this book and was captivated by the narrator's unique voice, so I was really looking forward to reading this. Once I starting reading, though, I found myself alternately delighted, annoyed, entertained, frustrated, and confused (frequently within the same page). Some passages were wonderful and dizzying and conveyed fabulously descriptive emotion and thought. Some passages were unbearably tiresome and meandering and convoluted. Maybe this is what the 21st century James Joyce is like. Is this what it's supposed to be like to be inside a millennial's brain? I would never survive there. Maybe I'm not smart enough to read this book. Maybe I'm too old. Maybe I'm too immature, and my attention span is too short. Whatever it is - I just couldn't do it. I wanted to. I was sufficiently intrigued at points to keep on going. I have picked up and put down this book more times than I can count in the last 3-4 months, but I'm throwing in the towel. If it wasn't for the fact that I received an ARC from the publisher (via netgalley) and I wanted to be able to write a full review, I would have stopped trying a long time.

Person disappears in a museum? A museum mystery? With maps? Yes, yes and yes! Is what went through my mind when this one came up for review.

The summary promised lots of tantalizing elements which is what drew me in for a review.

Stella Krakus, a curator at Manhattan’s renowned Central Museum of Art, is having the roughest week in approximately ever. Her soon-to-be ex-husband (the perfectly awful Whit Ghiscolmbe) is stalking her, a workplace romance with “a fascinating, hyper-rational narcissist” is in freefall, and a beloved colleague, Paul, has gone missing.

Strange things are afoot: CeMArt’s current exhibit is sponsored by a Belgian multinational that wants to take over the world’s water supply, she unwittingly stars in a viral video that’s making the rounds, and her mother–the imperious, impossibly glamorous Caro–wants to have lunch. It’s almost more than she can overanalyze.


But the appearance of a mysterious map, depicting a 19th-century utopian settlement, sends Stella–a dogged expert in American graphics and fluidomanie (don’t ask)–on an all-consuming research mission.

As she teases out the links between a haunting poem, several unusual novels, a counterfeiting scheme, and one of the museum’s colorful early benefactors, she discovers the unbearable secret that Paul’s been keeping, and charts a course out of the chaos of her own life.

Pulsing with neurotic humor and dagger-sharp prose, Impossible Views of the World is a dazzling debut novel about how to make it through your early thirties with your brain and heart intact (summary from Goodreads).

Sure the summary sounded wordy and excessive but this book is meant to be a mystery for the high brow readers I think. There’s a lot of large words and pomp just in the summary alone, but I was intrigued and thought a mystery in a museum sounded entertaining.

This was a dense read for me. The language that highjacked the summary carried over into the story itself. There was a ton of grandiose and pretentious language that bog this book way way down. I just felt like the language was forces and trying to hard. This book could have been amazing but the style just took over and made it difficult to read and digest. This book wasn’t that long but it took me a while to get through, not to mention to get in to. I could tell that the author was more of a poet than a novelist so in some ways I felt like the book was trying to be something that it wasn’t based on the approach linguistically. So right off that bat that bothered me.

But I continued….why? Well there was part of me that felt determined to read this book and hoped that I would eventually love it. The summary sounds so great and the cover is enchanting. I kept hoping against hope that I could get through the language and it would eventually become less heavy but it didn’t. By the time I accepted that it wasn’t going to get any less dense, I just felt like I owed it to the book to keep going.

So clearly I didn’t love this book, but it had its moments where I was thinking to myself ‘this could be a great book without all the language’. For instance the way the author used history and art together along with the map was excellent. I kept reading mostly because I liked how the map worked within the story.

I also felt like Stella was relatable to the target audience. Stella is 30 and struggling to find her purpose in life and I know that when I turned 30 all I could think of was ‘man I can’t screw things up too bad anymore and blame it on age because now I’m an adult’. So I think having her be in this kind of limo was great and I enjoyed that more than I expected.

On the whole I wanted to love this book and I tried to look for areas where I could justify a fair rating but I just couldn’t love this one. This book is written for a certain type of person and that person just isn’t me. Perhaps there are others who will enjoy this book, but for me the language just bogged it down too much to enjoy.

Challenge/Book Summary:

Book: Impossible Views of the World by Lucy Ives

Kindle Edition, 304 pages
Published August 1st 2017 by Penguin Press
ASIN B01N8OJSVA
Review copy provided by: Publisher/Author in exchange for an honest review
This book counts toward: NA

Hosted by: NA
Books for Challenge Completed: NA
Recommendation: 2 out of 5

Genre: Mystery , contempo lit

Memorable lines/quotes:

Though I enjoyed some aspects of this book, it was a bit difficult to get through. I enjoyed the main character's (Stella) personality and determination, but it just wasn't enough to help the storyline work well. The book is more about the life of Stella Krakus then the "disappearance" of Stella's colleague Paul. I read through the book in it's entirety waiting for the larger story to enfold, and it never did. Lots of interesting bits...but at the end I was left feeling disappointed.

I had high hopes for this one given the museum setting and the promise of an art-related mystery. And I was enjoying the twisty sentences full of unexpected word choices. However, by p. 52 I realized that the plot and characters had failed to grab me, and it appeared that the main character's love life was likely to occupy a far greater part than I cared to follow. As I couldn't even be bothered to flip to the end to see how it all turned out, it was time to move on to the next book in my pile.
Did Not Finish, but I may try Lucy Ives' next book fot the sake of the quirky writing.

When I first started this book, I found the writing refreshing, with a mix of beautiful and unfamiliar words, as well as contemporary speech patterns. Unfortunately, this book was not for me.  Since it was an ARC, I really wanted to finish it to be able to give an accurate review.  However, I also have a “rule” such that I don’t finish books that I am not enjoying (unless it is for book club). The mystery was introduced in the beginning, but it took too long to get to the point where the character was investigating for my taste. A podcaster whose opinion I trust really loved this book, though, so I am willing to give Lucy Ives another chance for her next book.

Stella Krakus is having a bad week. Her almost-ex-husband is basically stalking her, her glamorous-yet-overbearing mother wants to meet for lunch, and her boss/lover is breaking up their romance as gently as his narcissism will let him. On top of it all, her colleague Paul has gone missing. But he’s left behind a map that piques Stella’s interest. As she researches into its origins, a mystery opens itself that promises to reveal secrets Stella never dreamed of.

Unfortunately, making promises is all this book can do. Actually delivering on them is a bit too much to ask. I wanted to like Impossible Views of the World, I really did. I loved the sound of the blurb, it made it sound like a funny and interesting mystery and I was excited to read it. But it was none of these things.

The first thing I noticed about the book was the writing style. It’s difficult, I won’t lie, it is in no way easy to read. I would consider myself a smart person with a pretty good vocabulary, but I struggled with a lot of the words used. It reminded me of the episode of Friends where Joey uses the thesaurus for every word when writing the letter for Chandler and Monica.

I know that Lucy Ives is also a poet, and that definitely comes through in her language and writing style. I’m not personally a fan of poetry so maybe that’s why the style didn’t work for me. It was all just a little pretentious and unnecessary for me, but maybe it’s more of a personal preference. If you like the more poetic style of writing, maybe you won’t mind as much.

As well as the language, the plot itself was quite difficult to follow. If you thought my description at the beginning was a little vague that’s because I’m still not sure what the book was about even after finishing it. Stella is a curator at the Central Museum of Art in New York, so a lot of the plot centred around the art scene. I don’t know much about art so maybe if you have more of an interest in it you’ll be able to follow everything a bit more, but for me it was just confusing.

There was a lot of times I found myself having to re-read a line or a paragraph to try to understand what was going on, but after a while I gave up re-reading because I just wanted to finish the book, I was getting a bit sick of the amount of effort I had to put in just to figure out what the book was about.

Stella herself wasn’t a particularly likeable character either and I found myself getting annoyed at her a lot of the time. She reminded me of Carrie Bradshaw at times as she was very airy-fairy and didn’t seem to have much of a grasp on the real world. She never seemed to actually do any work relating to her job, rather she just obsessed over the map left by Paul (I can’t even say why she was so obsessed over it, either, because I don’t know why myself). I thought that the writer was trying too hard to make her seem quirky and unusual, which goes back to my dislike of the writing style in a way, so maybe others would be fine with it. But it wasn’t for me.

I was disappointed with Impossible Views of the World. I had high hopes for it as a funny mystery but it let me down. I never laughed and the mystery of the map was too confusing for me to care. I know that a lot of the problems I had were personal preference, so maybe this books would suit someone else. I wouldn’t say definitely don’t read this, but if you think your book preferences are similar to mine then it’s safe to say you won’t enjoy it.