ARC REVIEW: The Fellowship Of Puzzlemakers – by Samuel Burr

Title: The Fellowship Of Puzzlemakers
Author: Samuel Burr
Genre: Fiction, Contemporary
First published: April 9th 2024
Publisher: Doubleday
Finished reading: March 12th 2024
Pages: 336

“The magic was always found in the solving, never in the solution.”

*** A copy of this book was kindly provided to me by Netgalley and Doubleday in exchange for an honest review. Thank you! ***

REVIEW

WARNING: it’s another unpopular opinion review!!

I have a weak spot for stories with older main characters and a found family trope, so I thought that The Fellowship Of Puzzlemakers would be a perfect fit for me. I loved the sound of the premise, with the mystery around Clayton’s birth parents, the idea of the fellowship and the puzzle element… And I fully expected to enjoy my time with this debut. Sadly, the complete opposite ended up being true, and I somehow I struggled considerably to make it to the end. I seem to be an outlier as most people seem to love this book, but I’ll try to explain what did and didn’t work for me in case I’m not the only one out there who couldn’t quite connect to this story.

First of all, I have to say that I still love the premise of The Fellowship Of Puzzlemakers and the general idea behind the plot and everything that happens. The fellowship and its members are so intriguing, and I enjoyed learning more about how the fellowship was formed and grew over time. The puzzle element was great as well, although I have to say the effect was kind of ruined as they didn’t come out well at all in the kindle version. I suspect they would work so much better on paper though! I also do hope that the basic math errors that popped up will be edited out in the final version.

Now, where did it go wrong for me then? It was probably mostly the execution, and not the content of the story for me. First of all, the pace is extremely slow, and I struggled considerably to stay invested and convince myself to keep reading. I kept putting it down to do other things, and you know something is wrong when you rather start cleaning than read another chapter… The fact that the story constantly switches between past and present didn’t really help either; dual timelines can go both ways for me in the first place, but in this case it was not the timelines, but the sheer amount of switches combined with the short chapters for me. It made it really hard to connect to the main characters, as I never felt I got to spend any proper quality time with them before I had to switch my brain to a completely different era.

As for the characters… Somehow I was never able to warm up to them. I mentioned the constant POV switches, but this wasn’t the only issue for me. There is something almost distant about the way the story is told, and this distance made it hard to make a proper connection to the characters. I never felt invested in what was happening, and as a result I struggled to care about what was going to happen next. The mystery of Clayton’s parentage was also a bit too simple, because there frankly aren’t too many female characters to choose from in the first place… As a result, the final reveal wasn’t all that satisfying to me.

I’m not saying that The Fellowship Of Puzzlemakers is a bad read though, but it definitely wasn’t the book for me. I somehow liked the idea behind this story a lot more than the actual execution… But then again, I seem to be in the minority, so don’t give up on my account if you like the sound of this debut. Chances are high it will work better for you!