The first novella was convoluted and only OK.

The second novella, "The Hoegbotton Guide tot he Early History of Ambergris," was terrible. It is written from the perspective of a historian several hundred years later, and it could not be more boring. There are hundreds of footnotes, the first of which says that the reader will not understand the story without reading the footnotes, but at the end, the reader realizes that the footnotes are just tripe. There is a long glossary after the end of the story. I finally lost patience and did not read those. The only reason I plowed through this story and did not lay it down is that the third novella, "The Transformation of Martin Lake," is a World Fantasy Award winning novella, and I thought I might need to understand the first two stories to understand the third.

I can not understand why the third novella, "The transformation of Martin Lake," is a World Fantasy Award winner. The text alternates between the story and text purportedly written by an art critic describing Martin Lake's paintings. The art critique adds absolutely nothing to the story and only slows down the already ploddingly slow story. I felt cheated to have wasted my time on the first two stories. I'll never read this author again.