Mine All Mine, Davies. No. Davies seems to want this to be Soon I Will Be Invincible, or at least Bad Monkeys, but it’s just not. At the same logical point in the plot where I settled in to finish Half a Crown, I could very happily have set Mine All Mine down and thought of it almost never again. Davies is a decent writer, but he’s simply not good enough to succeed at the level of cleverness he attempted. Footnotes are especially not recommended.
Addendum: Turns out I hadn’t even finished the book; I was about a third of the way through the last chapter, and the book demonstrated its put-downability by letting me put it down and imagine I had finished it (I realized my misapprehension only when I was packing it up to take it back to the library and wondered why the bookmark was still in it). I think I like the ending I imagined it had better than the one it actually has.