My reviewer criteria. I like light, entertaining novels. I like smaller scale stories rather than epics. I like character focused novels featuring pleasant characters, with a minimum number of unpleasant ones. I greatly value clever and witty writing. I like first person, or close third person narratives. I dislike a lot of "head jumping" between POVs and flashbacks. I want a story, not a puzzle. While I am not opposed to violence, I dislike gore for the sake of gore. I find long and elaborate fight, action, and battle sequences tedious. Plot holes and things that happen for the convenience of the author annoy me. And I fear I'm a born critic in that I don't mind pointing out what I don't like in a story. However, I lay no claim to be the final arbitrator of style and taste, you need to decide for yourself what you like or dislike in a book.
Your opinions are always welcome. Comment below.
The Last of the Stanfields by Marc Levy DNF 28%
You might well like this book. It is by a French author, and is written in a lively fashion. It is, however, one of them modern books. I don't like most modern books.
The basic plot is that in 2016 our first person narrator, Eleanor-Rigby Donovan, living in London, receives an anonymous letter stating that her late mother was both a very good, and a very evil person, and it might pay to discover her past. About 25% of the way through, we have another first person narrator in the character of George-Harrison Collins, living in Canada who receives a similar letter. His mother is in memory care and this father left before he was born. However, interspersed with this time line, we have a story set in Baltimore Maryland in 1980 about two women who set up a newspaper to speak truth to power. Obviously, at least one of these two women is Eleanor-Rigby's mother - there is a mystery involving her and her father - and given the name of George-Harrison, whose father left before he was born, we have a connection there as well. The mystery then is just finding out what happened in 1980, which could be told as a straight story without the "mystery" the letters create.
I had the best intentions of giving this book a chance, and I think I did. But, alas, I can not get interested in any story if I don't have a character in the story to travel through it. This jumping around in time, and narrators just derails any interest in the story for me. I need to be on the ground with the characters, not above looking down on them. And even in the "present" time period told by the first person narrators, the narration shifts to third person for the scenes when the narrator isn't present, which is at least an interesting way of working around the limits of a first person narrator. However for me, the inability to get interested in the 1980 story, and the rather sentimental 2016 story, was too much for me. But, for the right reader, this might be an enjoyable story.
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