5%
I can already tell this probably won't be for me, but I'm going to give it a little longer.
Some of the issues are just differences between American and British English, ("cowboy operators"?) while other issues are with the writing. There seem to be a lot of stilted, uninformative lines like,
"I step across the hall...to give Earl, the cat, fresh water and food. He slinks around my legs while I sort it all out."
"...there is a night manager called Luke who often wears a bandana."
We're told the owner of the bookshop, George, is "laconic and gentle", but he's quite animated when he's fucking with the narrator or the poor hippie, (the narrator thinks George himself was probably at Woodstock, but I guess that's the good kind of hippie?) who dares object to taxidermy.
I consider myself to have a fair vocabulary and I don't mind looking up words I don't recognize, but I've already had to look up several that are labeled archaic in my dictionary. It comes off as pretentious and try-hard.
We haven't really had any plot yet, and I'm hoping that might salvage my enjoyment, but I'm not feeling this.
ETA: Her boyfriend has only taken her to a fancy restaurant once, on their first date and only for drinks, preferring holes-in-the-wall. But he tips waiters to get the best tables. So either he's going to all these fancy places without her, which is hella rude, or he's tipping diner waiters for the "best table".
1
