According to my review scale on my profile page, a 1.5 star book is one that might have had promise in pockets, but it was overall not a great reading experience. That description is pretty accurate for this book, although I feel bad about giving it such a low rating. It is a great idea, but it’s hard going. There’s a LOT of information and I’m not sure how much of it I’ll actually retain. It’s the sort of book that would probably take months to read, a couple of pages at a time. I did not have months to read it or the interest to read that much of it. ( )

I really enjoy reading about linguistics and languages and was really happy to receive an ARC of this book :)
Overall, I have to say I was a bit disappointed that the linguistics content was scarce. There weren't many facts about the languages. I was glad when there were some, and translations of the Little Prince were used to compare languages, but only in the Latin script even for languages with other scripts and without guidance on pronunciation or many interesting insights.
The focus is also quite heavily on Indo-European languages, but the list of languages and language islands is still quite extensive. What was interesting was the focus on geographical and historical data to explain how language islands appeared. For example, I learnt quite a few facts about Armenian rose jam in Venice or Brazil areas having Venetian as a co-official language. But not that much about the languages themselves, which is why my rating isn't higher. I could still feel that the author is passionate about the topic and wanted to transmit this.
I want to thank Collins Reference and NetGalley for gifting me a free ARC copy of this book in exchange for an honest review. ( )