** spoiler alert ** My favourite memory of this book is when I was reading along, thoroughly hating everything, and then the book abruptly ended fifty pages before I was expecting it to because it turns out the rest of it is all appendices.

I don't even know where to begin reviewing this book, although the rant I launched into on Tumblr taught me I had many things to say. Perhaps I was doomed to dislike this book when I started at page one and discovered that its two main characters were named Paul and Jessica. Still, I moved past that; I'd heard this book was good, I was going to persevere. Then on page 20 or so Paul was obnoxious and sexist and I got frustrated. And then, it has to be said, Paul never really did anything to redeem himself for being generally obnoxious. Mostly he just oscillated between continuing to be obnoxious and being some all-seeing, all-knowing dispenser of wisdom and neither of those personas was particularly endearing.

Honestly, I was annoyed for a lot of the book that Paul had all of these special mental abilities that supposedly had never been had by men before, only women, and Paul was such an arrogant twerp anyway that I strongly disliked him being some kind of Chosen One. I felt that Frank Herbert was going to have this rule that only women can have these powers, the character of Paul should have been a woman then. But then it seems that the entire point of the plot is that he IS the first man to have this abilities - the Kwisatz Haderach or however it's supposed to be spelt - so then I guess it just annoyed me that there was this deep gender essentialism in something that should not have anything to do with gender at all (the innate abilities of the brain...).

Aside from that! This book also had approximately 9658976897579668 male characters who I couldn't tell the difference between. Towards the end there some guy named Guernsey or something turned up and supposedly he was Paul's friend from way back but I had no clue who he was and nor was I entirely sure I was supposed to. The female characters who existed seemed mostly interested in basking in the glory of Paul (probably he had a halo or something too, idk). Chani was nothing more than his love interest. That woman he won (as property) by killing Jamis was the same. Alia barely even did anything. Jessica was by far the most developed of the female characters, but even she was really disappointing because literally everyone spent the entire book talking about what a threat she posed to Paul and like, no, she didn't in any way whatsoever. PAUL HIMSELF at one point identified Jessica as his "true enemy" and well, I guess he's not all-seeing and all-knowing after all because that was LITERALLY NEVER FOLLOWED UP ON. All she did was disapprove of his relationship with Chani because she's an utter snob and disapproved of him seeing a "desert girl". Wow. I'm shaking in my boots, Jessica.

There are some defences to be made of this book - for instance, Herbert was obviously not trying to write about anything other than a deeply sexist society, so the fact that women get treated as property and evaluated in terms of their marriageability is not a flaw of the writer so much as the deeply annoying society he invented. Nonetheless, there were not enough female characters and those characters that did exist were not strong enough to counteract this. But then again, the male characters weren't very strong either, hence why I mixed them all up, so... really...

Anyway, I was dithering about whether to give this book two stars or three (mostly because I'd heard it was so good and I thought I'd judged it unfairly just because of the names-of-the-characters thing making me hostile from the off). BUT THEN I READ THE LAST PAGE.

NO JOKE, the last page is about how Paul has to marry this Princess Irulan to secure peace across the kingdoms or something but NO WORRIES because he's going to treat Princess Irulan like a worthless piece of shit forever because his true love is Chani! And Jessica is really pleased about this because she no longer hates Chani and she apparently thinks Princess Irulan deserves to live a life of misery because, y'know, she dared to be born a woman into a family that would force her into an arranged marriage and that is definitely all her fault.

Seriously, I hate you Jessica.

And basically everyone in this book, really. I guess Chani was okay, if not very well developed. Also the woman Paul won off Jamis, she was sassy, except I forgot her name so I guess not that sassy.

In conclusion...

This book is hyped beyond all proportion. I didn't understand it and it annoyed me but if you like long books with irritating and indistinguishable characters, go for your life.

(EDIT: I decided to demote this book from two stars to one star, because I actually really hated it so two stars was bizarrely generous. I don't remember anything I liked about this book. Don't read it.)