Rounding it up for Goodreads but this more of a 3.5 for me.

To start out I'm not sure if this is an author I will pick up again and its not because I didn't enjoy the story, its due in regards to her writing style. The biggest issue I had while reading this was finding her rhythm in her writing. Something about the the way she would write some of her sentences felt, backwards to me, because my brain would immediately read them a certain why but then upon looking over it again I would realize I read the sentence wrong, or I would immediately start stumbling over the structure. So I was constantly tripping over sentences. Now normally this would turn me away from continuing my read through, but I was really intrigued by the story so I pushed through, but knowing I should have spent 4 hours reading this and not two days is extremely frustrating. If this is how she normally writes, I can't see myself grabbing anything else from her.

Now the story as I said was extremely intriguing to me. In this world there is this man named Last and no one knows if he is a god, an immortal or what. There are all kinds of rumors and stories about him and how he survives the Driftwood, a place where everything ultimately converges together before finally vanishing from the greater universe. But rumor has it he has died.

We learn about Last through a series of short stories that are presented by the people of Drift Wood. I enjoyed this approach because each story showed him in a different light but ultimately they always seemed to have a final end that was similar. This world is bleak and the story carries this melancholy tune from beginning to end, and it absolutely captivating. There was something about the topic of loss of culture and world that just compelled me to continue. People of all different backgrounds where converging in this place, many came searching to find answers or how to survive and Last was the one they wanted to answer these questions.

Last never once came off cruel in his stories, even when we was being absolutely honest about how the world worked. Even when stepping in to stop a leader of a cult he never really showed cruelty. A lot of the melancholy tones came from him, he always felt defeated, and lost, yet somehow kept going even with his own burdens on his shoulders.

I thought the end was an interesting choice, it fits the theme of the book, and while I didn't hate it, I can see it maybe not being satisfying for others.

Driftwood is an intriguing read, that I'm glad I gave a shot.

DNF at 119 pages (57%)
I ended up listening to the audio version of this via Scribd and at this point feel safe in classifying this as not for me.

Driftwood is a sort of collection of stories about a character named Last, who is one of the longest living survivors of a place called Driftwood, where all worlds go to die. The story is told as other survivors recounting their experiences with Last after rumors start to circulate that he's died or gone missing.

I really like the idea of this story, where you essentially have this black hole where people whose worlds are dying are just jammed together as their world disintegrates and they try to deal with the reality of that. Unfortunately, I never really felt connected to any of it. I think if you're more of a plot or themes driven reader, this might work better. As someone who is pretty character driven, I never got enough of any character within the stories to stay interested on a character level. And as someone who enjoys world-building, I never spent long enough in any place to care to learn the names or the peoples or their history. It felt like the epitome of "Cool story, Hansel."