by Susanna Kearsley
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
This book could have been a really beautiful novel but it failed me from the 2nd chapter on and I really don't know how I managed not to abandon it.
--- (WARNING before reading: English is not my native language, so please forgive me any form or/and grammar errors)---
At first glance I was captured by the cover, then reading the plot:
a castle, a story dating back to Queen Isabella and John Lackland (Richard the Lionheart's brother), another tragic story back to World War II, a kidnapping, a contemporary love story and a group of friends investigating...
Wow! It looked like an amazing plot, something really engaging.
So I didn't rest until I found this 1992 book with the old cover (that of the new editions is gloomy and horrible), after a month of searching I finally found it and I was very happy.
The very long prologue tells of characters from a past time, Isabella locked up in the tower at Chinon and her hope of being saved by her husband King John of England.
This suggests that this story will have a huge influence on the plot of the book and that we will discover other things about it ... but it is not so and chapter by chapter other data of other historical episodes and legends are mentioned and the multiple characters all look like this unrelated to each other and no one is really put in the foreground, not even the protagonist!
The problem is that the author had so many ideas in her head that she was unable to find something to focus on and develop in a passionate way, she started at least 10 plots (or almost 10) with too many characters, some of them really insignificant and from one theme she passed to another and then another one and then another one again...
Eventually Kearsley, the author, looks for a way to tie the characters together, but it all feels like a stretch and there's no passion in the characters, they're flat.
Too bad, because if she had eliminated at least 4 characters (even better 5) and had developed the others in a better way, making them more vivid and profound, the book could have given strong emotions.
Until half way through the book nothing important happens and even later, some characters on which the author had focused at the beginning, are all ignored...it's as if while writing the book, the writer had changed her mind a thousand times about what she wanted to write and therefore continuously changed the path of the plot.
I wonder how an editor could have published a book that looks like a closet full of objects that belong to the same person but have nothing to do with the other objects.
---> I would not recommend this book to anyone who is looking for a mystery, nor to anyone who is looking for a romantic story, no romance at all, except few lines in the end.
Dialogues were flat ( especially in the first half of the book where we only read silly chatter, they were better in the second half of the book ).
As for the characters...I can't even give a definition, they were not well developed, some only hinted at (yet one of them is the one she falls in love with) others really stupid (the cousin she is looking for, who is also totally absent in the whole book except the first chapter and at the end) and insignificant and could be omitted).
The only two interesting characters:
---SPOILER ---[one is killed and the other turns out to be the killer. ] ---SPOILER END ---
The protagonist is practically dominated by the situations and chatter of others...an apathetic young woman.
I'm sure the author wanted to describe her as a very sensitive person with internal suffering...but what emerges is only the picture of an uninteresting woman.
----> I would nor recommend it to anyone who loves history and legends, too many notions included in the book and none in depth in a fascinating way.
The setting is very interesting and charming, but the writer is so willing to insert all the historical and descriptive details of the place into the novel that she mentions and tries to describe many, too many things, but actually she fails to make the reader enjoy any of them.
Maybe the writer should have written a travel guide on Chinon, then she could have told all the attractions of the place without making it into a disjointed cauldron.
---> But I really would like another author to rewrite this book, with the author's basic idea, but developing it more emotionally and making the characters more interesting and making them interact in a more sensible and homogeneous way !
The only thing that transpires from the book is how the writer liked this place... perhaps she should have written a tourist guide on this place, or a saga made up of several novels so that in each novel she could develop a theme and a mystery.
I'm sorry to have to give 2.5 stars rounded to 3 (only because I gave 3 stars to worse books and all in all there was potential here) but the writer did a really bad job, she had a nice starting idea for a novel, but then she wanted to put a little bit of everything in it and the novel turned into a tasteless soup!
The ending was meant to be sensational, but that too was really ill-conceived.
-- Book not available in Italian language --
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