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 Bookshop of Secrets by Kerry Barrett DNF 35%
This story is set in Lisbon from 1938 into 1940, at least as far as I made it into it. It follows a young woman, the daughter of a playwright and director, who after his death in 1938, travels to Portugal to visit the relatives of her mother, who had died when she was a baby. She finds that her grandparents are also dead, and with no one else to look up, she is set to return home, until she has all her money and passport stolen, so she finds a job in a bar to save up money to get home. Fast forward to 1940, with the war on, neutral Lisbon is overrun with refugees and secret agents. She gets fired from her bartender job, but lands a job in a bookstore, and thanks to her ability, as an aspiring actress, to mimic just about anyone, she is then recruited by British intelligence to help produce radio broadcasts with "secret" codes that contained false information to mislead the Germans they expect will hear them and break the code. From Portugal? Whatever.
So fa so good. The author apparently made some effort to explore Lisbon and the period. The problem is that despite all the color she put into the story, it did not, at least for me, create the impression of Lisbon in 1940. I think it takes more than descriptions of places, and the time. To create an authentic historical novel, the writing has to at least suggest the period. This book was written in a very modern, breezy style. I almost quit on the first page when the author used the term "drama queen" which took me right out of the story. But I soldiered on, and had come to enjoy it, as the characters were enjoyable and the plot was evolving, until...
Until the author tossed history overboard. It was 1940, refugees were said to be pouring in from France and elsewhere. The war said to be going badly for the English. It was hot and she was swimming in the ocean. Right; obviously the summer of 1940. And then she has her characters make their first broadcast as British secret agents, with the aim of misdirecting the Germans who, they believed, were about to invade Norway... An invasion that, in real life, began on 9th of April, 1940, followed by the invasion of France & Belgium beginning on the 10th of May, 1940, which is to say prior to the in-story time. And the war wasn't going all that badly for the British before that. It makes no sense to alter history for no reason other than the author's ignorance, or for the convenience of the story and the way she wanted to write it. This made me mad. What's the point of setting a story in a historical period and then not paying any attention it? You should fit your story into real history, not twist history to suit your story. And why? I[m sure one could come up with a different mission, or set this one in the proper time. In any event, I simply could not take the story seriously anymore. I moved on.
Onward.
Men of Bone by David Penny DNF 70%
If there is one thing that I hate, besides ignoring history in a historic novel, it is when an author has a character do a bone-headed thing just to ramp up the stakes. And that is something that Penny did around the 70% point in this novel. It annoyed me enough that I called it quits on this book. It is a me thing, a grumpy old man thing, so don't take my DNFing it as a general commentary about the book itself.
The first thing you should know, is that there are ten books chronicling the earlier career of Thomas Berrington. This, however, is the first book in a four book series telling the story of Berrington, now aged 60, upon his return to England and can be read without reading all those other books.
In this book he has been charged by his friend, the Queen of Spain, to look after her daughter, Princess Catherine of Aragon, who has been sent of to England to marry Arthur, the English King's eldest son. Historically accurate. They did wed. However the 15 year old Arthur died six months after his wedding, and Catherine lived on to became Henry the Eighth's first wife.
In any event, Berrington, who left England and had not returned until now, is now an expert doctor, having been trained by Arab doctors, and an excellent fighter, able to kill at least two knife wielding bad buys emptyhanded. On arrival he inadvertently stirs up trouble with an organized extortion gang, the "Bone Men" and trouble follows him north when he is asked by the King to look into a questionable Justice of the Peace on the Welsh border, who is, in fact, up to no good. So we have a historical mystery/thriller with plenty of intrigue and action.
It is a well written, well paced book. There was, however, nothing special in the writing, and no humor. Moreover, I failed to connect to the main character, Berrington. He was well developed, not surprising after 10 books, but I did not find him engaging. And for me, engaging characters are half of what I enjoy in books; writing and characters.
If I really like a book I'll read it every night and finish it in a couple of days. This book fell, well, short of that. I'd read it one evening, but wasn't invested in it enough to read it the next. I may've kept at it just to write this review, so when, he had a character do something too stupid, I just didn't care what happened next, and with other KU books to read, I called it quits and won't be continuing on with the series, or going back to his earlier career.
All that said, if you like historical fiction with lots of action, this book, and this series, might well appeal to you - as well as all the proceeding books.
No comments:
Post a Comment