One of the books I struggled with started with an introduction (a prologue by any other name) which was 22 pages long. That section is written in the first person, and is the record of an unknown therapist. The client he/she is talking to is also not identified by name. She's a female, but the introduction takes the form of the therapist's notes, and all the way through she's only called the client.
In short, this prologue is one massive info-dump of backstory, told by one unknown character to another. And it's a very confusing and and complex backstory at that. It involves two husbands, a lost brother, and half a dozen events that made no sense to me at all.
And yet... the novel is published by one of the major UK SF imprints. We're not talking about a thrown-together self-published book here. We're talking about a book that has been accepted and edited by a mainstream publisher.
Having looked it up, I see that this is the fourth book in a series, so I think this marathon prologue info- dump is an attempt to tell the reader what happened in the first three books. But it really doesn't work. And even the back cover blurb mentions that the world is confusing, and that there are an awful lot of interweaving story strands,
You might say that I ought to seek out and read the first book before criticising this. But readers often don't come to a series in the order the books were written. And I've picked up middle books of other series before and had no trouble working out what was going on. And wanted to read the rest of the series.
But not with this author. And after struggling through a 22 page info-dump attempt to get up to speed, I've no desire to persevere with the book.
Yes, I do get impatient with long descriptive set-ups, but this long interview didn't pitch me into the middle of the action at all. It pitched me in at the deep end, and I had no idea what was going on.
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