A milestone of sorts. My 100th book review in this format. I'm reading a fair amount of books these days, and not because I have a weekly book review slot to fill. No, I'm just back into reading, and luckily enough to stumble upon books that I enjoy reading, as I hope you have gathered from all my previous posts.
So what do we have this week? A bit of a break a return, once again, to last year's old standby in a special double book review!
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.
This is, alas, the last novel featuring Brother Cadfael. I have several short stories to read to wrap up this saga - see below - which tell of his early years, so this is where we must take leave of Brother Cadfael.
Once again there is a murder, and once again, it hardly matters at all, save to drive the plot. This is not a murder mystery in any sense, but a historical novel of a quest that Brother Cadfael undertakes to find his son, said to be held captive, without a ransom after one of the castles held by Empress Maud switches sides to King Stephen. Those who preferred to stay loyal to Empress Maud where taken and held for ransom, save for Brother Cadfael's son. No one knows what happened to him. He feels compelled to leave the monastery and search for him, getting limited permission to accompany his old friend the Sheriff to a peace conference between Maud and Stephen, in hopes of hearing the fate of this son. This proves unsuccessful, and presented with the dilemma of continuing his search, or abandoning his vows of obedience, he finds that he cannot abandon his son.
There is a lot of history, and a lot of characters in this story, making it a bit hard to follow at times, at least when it came to characters - who was who and whom were they for, and how they were related. As usual, I just went with the flow, and gathered what was what from the context. Because of the nature of the story, we no longer have the story centered around the rather cozy life of monk and monastery, and venture out into the war-torn England of the time period. And so, as you can see from my grade, it was not one of my favorites of the series, leaving much of what I like about the series behind for this, the last entry.
The short stories will wrap up this series. I'll miss Brother Cadfael, but as you may've noticed, I've found another writer and another time period to discover and enjoy. Stories very different, but very entertaining in their own unique way. All is good.
A Rare Benedictine by Elis Peters B
This is a collection of three short stories. In the first one we meet Cadfael a soldier in the service of Roger Mauduit who has been fighting alongside King Henry in Normandy. The war is over, Henry has won, and is returning home to England, as in Mauduit. Mauduit takes Cadfael and a scribe home with him. Mauduit is involved in a civil law case with the Monastery of Shrewsbury over property that was given to the monastery for the life of the giver, but Mauduit does not want to return it, the contract being a little vague. He, or his wife, hatches a plan to ensure a favorable outcome in the case to be tried before the King. Cadfael takes not only a hand in the affair, but decides to become a monk of the abbey.
The second story is about a gift to the abbey, and its theft, and how Cadfael, as usual, bends a few rules to set things right.
And the final one, about the theft of the Abbey's rent money. Nothing too elaborate.
All in all, not up to the standard of the novels, but what can one expect from short stories?
And so, as I said in the lede, this is my fond farewell to Brother Cadfael and Sheriff Hugo. A great series of books. We'll have to see what I can turn up next. I did enjoy that series about a detective nun in Tutor times, I believe...
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