1Q84 by Haruki Murakami
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Wow. Just wow.

I admit to being slightly intimidated by the idea of reading this novel. I read a novella of his from before and while I thought it was stylistically pretty great, I didn't FALL for it as I fell for this.

Haruki Murakami's longer fiction is amazing. :) It is smooth, full of great ideas, magical without being pretentious. And especially for it being closer to a mainstream book than a fantasy, I was worried it was going to wind up being something like a David Mitchell book.

But no. I thought it was a great pleasure to read from the first page to the last.

So, yeah, the great bits and great ideas abound. It's not just an easy and fun read, it's about a fantastic female assassin revenging abused women, it's about literary fraud, it's about slipping between dimensions and dealing with the Little People, Air Chrystali, religious cults, Receivers and Perceivers, and best of all, it's about a love that transcends time.

Sound great? It is great. I never once got bored.

It's a near-perfect blend of reality in Japan in 1984, sometimes altered in dimension, and a fantastic shout-out to old SF, modern magical realism, and epic transcendental love. :) Totally recommend.

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