Instruct: Classify a given Amazon review as either positive or negative.
Query: Prose that's proud of itself

It's taken me a while to get through this book partly because I'm not very excited about the plot and partly because the author's self-conscious writing style really annoys me. There are lovely phrases here and there, but there are plenty of others that read like something you'd find in a greeting card--they try hard to impress and fail. The author makes deliberate, almost constant use of foreshadowing, perhaps in an attempt to get the reader to stick with the book and not lay it down for good. I'm contemplating the latter.