The Quickening maze by Adam Foulds

The Quickening Maze by Adam Foulds was a book I got through the Amazon Vine program to review. this review was of the Advance Uncorrected Proof but I noted that it had a blurb on the front cover that it was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. If I learned anything from this book, it was to avoid books that are shorlisted or have won the Man Booker prize as they are certainly not what I want to read!

The following is my 1 star review of the book:

The best thing I can say for this book is the author does have a way with words and writing very descriptive paragraphs using lots of words not in common usage. Unfortunately when it comes to stringing all those descriptive paragraphs together he fails in a big way. This book was a maze to read. Often you had no idea who was ‘speaking/thinking’ at any one time. The book seemed to have no beginning, end or even a middle. It was a very disconnected, boring book that I ended up putting down for several days to read several truly interesting books and then had to force myself to finish it.


Perhaps since the book was taking place at an insane asylum, the author felt it best to make everyone in the book have mental health troubles except for the gypsies that were occasionally mentioned in the book. Reading this book felt like being in a hallucination. Don’t waste your time. There are too many wonderful books in the world to read without wasting your time on this one.

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If you like your reading to feel like you are taking Honors English and need to do a term paper of some sort, perhaps The Quickening Maze might do the trick for you, but for me, I have better things to do with my time.