This book is one of the worst that I've read! It took me weeks to get through this book (compared to 2-3 days for most books). There is no unifying plot, and the writing is atrocious - the similes and metaphors seem contrived to be original, but convey no meaning. The symbolism too obscure for most readers to understand (e.g. the split pig). Many paragraphs seemed thrown in for no reason. In my opinion, the only part of the book that was interesting was the portrait of the shy, budding relationship between Valuable and Jackson. The book should have ended there. Until the end, it was hard to stay interested in the book, because it was hard to see why there was any point in describing these characters. The character descriptions were not bad, but this book had neither moving plot nor enjoyable prose, and a good book has to have at least one of these to be worthwhile.