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The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August Claire North 9780316399623 Books

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The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August Claire North 9780316399623 Books

I don't really understand the reviews that said this book was slow-paced -- I read it in a single week and had a tough time putting it down. For a book about a man who is literally immortal, this book actually moves along at a decent clip.

First, the bad: I will say that, at points, this book gets caught up in its own brilliance and comes across as a little pretentious and heavy-handed. At other times the author seemed to deliberately choose the most confusing possible way of getting an idea across, and a few pages I had to reread several times to understand (most of Vincent's conversations with Harry, especially at the beginning, were this way). Some of the more emotionally weighty moments were given a bit TOO much weight and, rather than being memorable in the way of a beautiful view, are instead memorable in the way of getting slapped rather sluggishly with a wet towel.

That said, I was so enraptured that, when I finished this book and realized it was nearly five-hundred pages, I was stunned, because it hadn't felt nearly so long. It takes a while to get going -- the first half of the book is world-building and exposition, but done so exquisitely and with such originality that I found that I didn't really care where it was going, only that I was along for the ride. The book regains its focus at about the halfway point, where all of the exposition from the first half suddenly clicks into place -- I feel the ending of the book would not have been nearly so powerful had the author not taken as much time in the beginning to give her story weight.

What I dismissed in the beginning as a failure to explain the mechanics of her world was instead a vital piece of Harry's moral struggle -- we don't know how the kalachakra work, but neither does he, and what is the price of finding out? Similarly, scenes whose point I did not understand turned out to be vitally important for Harry's development and decision-making -- anything involving Phearson, for example -- and because of these scenes, Harry is remarkably well-developed for a character who spends half the book pretending to be a blank slate.

The characters are very complex, the plot is complicated but fairly easy to understand, the world is wonderfully strange. There's so much to chew on in this book, and quite a lot to parse, both thematically and narratively. This book comes together at the end so beautifully that I was tempted to immediately start a second read-through just to put it all together a bit better. It has its rough points, and perhaps could have been streamlined better, but the overall experience was so exquisite that I have to give it five stars.


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The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August Claire North 9780316399623 Books Reviews

premise but with a twist. The title character is the bastard son of an English lord and a kitchen maid who was born on January 1, 1919. The maid died giving birth, but the boy is adopted by the lord’s gamekeeper and his wife. August lives a long life but after his death he finds himself reborn as exactly the same person at the same place and time with all of his memories intact. In his third life, he finds people in the same predicament as him and joins a secret society known as the Cronus Club. They also call themselves “Ourobourans” and “Kalichakrans” and have learned to pass information both to the past and to the future. The story is told in first person in a non-linear manner, and August has gone through fifteen lives up to that point. The plot is full of twists and is hard to put down when you get to the last hundred pages.
Two aspects of this novel reminded me of Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire. The more lives August experiences the more detached he becomes from ordinary human emotions, and his nemesis and friend Victor, another Ourobouran, has already become a complete sociopath, much like Rice’s vampires after they have lived a few centuries. Also, the first few years after he is reborn, while he is physically a child, he is emotionally an old man, like Rice’s vampire Claudia, who became a vampire as a child.
What if you could life forever but instead of living in past, present and future, you live the same few decades of your life over and over again? Would you ever get bored?
Harry August has been reborn and doesn’t understand what is happening to him. That is until he finds The Cronus Club. After one of the Cronus club members helps Harry out of a bad situation he cannot escape on his own. Harry leans about the others like him and the rules they must follow. Harry goes on living his lives as a contributing member of the Cronus club until a young girl catches Harry on his death bed and gives him a message to send up from young to old, young to old. “The world is ending faster than it should be and always has in the past.” Can Harry find who is causing the future to change from the past and stop them?

I will say that I ended up really liking the book. The problem is that the beginning moves so very slow. I almost gave up reading this book several times. But kept hearing other people’s reviews about how the story picks up. So I kept going. I’m glad I did. The last 25% of the book really make the story one worth reading. This was a deeper and darker story than what I initially that I was reading. It makes you question so many things. This is the type of book that stays with you longer after you’ve finished reading it.

I struggled with what rating to give this. The slowness of the beginning really is off-putting. There will be many readers not able to finish because the story has no visible direction for so much of the book. I can definitely see how people came to the different rating. The 2 stars will be the people who gave up and stopped reading. The 4 stars will be the people who enjoy the last part so much that it’s enough to overlook the slow build up. Then there will be those like me who really liked the book but just couldn’t get passed how slow the being was and felt that the book suffered for it. So that is how I came to my 3 star rating.
I don't really understand the reviews that said this book was slow-paced -- I read it in a single week and had a tough time putting it down. For a book about a man who is literally immortal, this book actually moves along at a decent clip.

First, the bad I will say that, at points, this book gets caught up in its own brilliance and comes across as a little pretentious and heavy-handed. At other times the author seemed to deliberately choose the most confusing possible way of getting an idea across, and a few pages I had to reread several times to understand (most of Vincent's conversations with Harry, especially at the beginning, were this way). Some of the more emotionally weighty moments were given a bit TOO much weight and, rather than being memorable in the way of a beautiful view, are instead memorable in the way of getting slapped rather sluggishly with a wet towel.

That said, I was so enraptured that, when I finished this book and realized it was nearly five-hundred pages, I was stunned, because it hadn't felt nearly so long. It takes a while to get going -- the first half of the book is world-building and exposition, but done so exquisitely and with such originality that I found that I didn't really care where it was going, only that I was along for the ride. The book regains its focus at about the halfway point, where all of the exposition from the first half suddenly clicks into place -- I feel the ending of the book would not have been nearly so powerful had the author not taken as much time in the beginning to give her story weight.

What I dismissed in the beginning as a failure to explain the mechanics of her world was instead a vital piece of Harry's moral struggle -- we don't know how the kalachakra work, but neither does he, and what is the price of finding out? Similarly, scenes whose point I did not understand turned out to be vitally important for Harry's development and decision-making -- anything involving Phearson, for example -- and because of these scenes, Harry is remarkably well-developed for a character who spends half the book pretending to be a blank slate.

The characters are very complex, the plot is complicated but fairly easy to understand, the world is wonderfully strange. There's so much to chew on in this book, and quite a lot to parse, both thematically and narratively. This book comes together at the end so beautifully that I was tempted to immediately start a second read-through just to put it all together a bit better. It has its rough points, and perhaps could have been streamlined better, but the overall experience was so exquisite that I have to give it five stars.