Wow. This book was like an endless — mindless even — salad bowl, where the salad is sometimes hard to chew and full of yucky flavour combinations yet it's also good for you and you can't help but dig deeper with your fork. Zadie Smith's writing is unlike anyone else's, I've never come across anything like it, but I'm glad that now I have. It's colourful, witty, compelling, punchy, vivid, impactful, impressive, powerful and so on and so forth. I could hardly relate to any of the characters on a personal level yet I didn't even need to — the story already had so much in it that it had me wrapped around its finger since the very beginning.