Night Boat to Tangier, by Kevin Barry

The format and style for this book was overly confusing. The style reads like a play, but the format is just spacing without any indicators. For example, you frequently must figure out when a character is speaking. It was a lot of work.

The language also created a challenge. While many words were not found on my Kindle, some sentences didn’t even make sense to me. I am not sure if this is due to a cultural difference, but as a Westerner I was lost and confused about the context often. 
The story was also hard to follow because there were pieces left out; it would skip from one topic in a paragraph to something completely different in the next without ever filling in those missing pieces.

The blurb explains the synopsis quite well. The two men, Charlie and Maurice are old drug dealers waiting at the port looking for Maurice’s daughter. While waiting, they reminisce about their dark past. In my opinion, however, I feel like the blurb should be written in the style and format of the book so that the reader gets a taste of what they are getting into. 
I felt like Charlie and Maurice were both interesting characters with interesting backgrounds, but I didn’t feel emotionally attached to them.

Also, a few pages into chapter one I started counting the number of f**k bombs. A few pages into the chapter I counted 13, so that means there are 13+ in chapter one alone. This type of language continues this way for the remainder of the book, if not picking up its pace. There is also a lot of sex and drug usage.

While this wasn’t the book for me, it has received many great reviews that you might check out on Amazon and Goodreads. Thanks to Doubleday Books and Netgalley for this advanced copy in exchange for my honest review.

| Purchase on Amazon | Goodreads Review |