I read about The Book of the New Sun before I started Shadow & Claw. I read about the difficult beauty of Gene Wolfe's prose. I read that there were puzzles in the book, that the unreliable narrator made Shadow & Claw a kind of guessing game—what's real, what isn't? I read comparisons to Joyce, Proust, and Melville. I read Neil Gaiman and Ursula K. Le Guin's glowing recommendations. I was very excited to read the most acclaimed fantasy novel since Lord of the Rings. I was excited to begin my foray into modern fantasy fiction with the author described by fans as the greatest writer alive.

I was extremely disappointed.

Wolfe creates a mildly compelling world, but holy cow, this is a boring book. No plot, undeveloped characters, bad writing. Yeah, I said it, bad writing. I liked the occasional flourishes about "the nature of reality" or whatever, but Wolfe's technical skills seem limited to dropping eighth-century nouns into middle-school-level prose. The nouns are cool, but that's about it.

If this is the best modern fantasy has to offer, then this probably isn't the genre for me.