Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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42 of 46 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
disappointing, 21 Mar 2008
I really tried to like this book. It seemed to have all the ingredients of a blockbusting epic. I was concerned though that the author had chosen the same setting and genre as her previous novel and unfortunately my fears were confirmed. I was happier in the past than the present and none of the ingredients seemed to add an awful lot to the story. Was it about the tarot, or debussy or seeking Meredith's ancestry. None of these dominated and the flights into fantasy were clumsy and didn't seem to fit into the story at all. And, I am sorry, but the grammar and language let the author down badly with some cringe making paragraphs that surely should have been picked up before publication.
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136 of 153 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Awkward, clumsy fiction , 2 Dec 2007
Like the other person here who wrote a bad review of Sepulchre, I have no wish to be vindictive to the author. Writing must be a little like baring your soul and to have it flayed alive must be hard for the author. Justified or not, there are some bitter (as well as some incredibly saccharine) reviews here.
However, though I've never written a review on Amazon before, I felt driven to in this instance. The time-slip novel is my favourite of all genres. Sadly, though I sat down for a rip-roaring read, I did not like this book at all. If you like the time-slip genre there so many better authors. It started ok enough, with atmosphere and setting up of characters, but then it went badly wrong.
The plot is convenient and contrived, the present-day American heroine is phoney (I'm a US citizen) and unnecessarily forced, the phrases are clichéd, the characters all seem cookie-cutter types, each with their own specific role to play without depth, shade, or subtly. The prose has some flair of the commercial writer, but is mainly obtuse and clumsy. Towards the end, the book badly fails and the finale hardly worth all that padding.
Kate Mosse obviously worked hard on the research for this novel - and the text at those points are tedious, overlong and actually quite boring. I do wonder though whether the author might concentrate her skills elsewhere. Still, she might as well cash in while she can until such a time as her publisher thinks she's no longer going to shift books. It does seem a little unfair to abuse us readers, the valuable ever dwindling pool of honest book buyers, into spending our money on such awkward fiction.
My recommendation is if you want a good time-slip novel, try other novelists.
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14 of 15 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
The palaver is finished!, 6 Jan 2008
Sepulchre was my nightly companion through an unwelcome episode of flu so the book's characters and descriptive narrative were somewhat magnified through vivid and feverish hallucinations. This was probably just as well as, in the cold light of day, the characterisation is weak and two-dimensional.
One feels an indifference to the fates of the various protagonists, especially the heroine Leonie. Mosse has hundreds of pages to develop the girl's personality beyond that of a petulant, impressionable and naive schoolgirl, yet fails. The evil psychopathic Constant is completely one dimensional. The modern day all American heroine, Meredith, lacks real substance which is disappointing given the musical possibilities and links to Debussy that Mosse fails to realise fully. The introduction of the Labyrinth characters Audric Baillard and Shelagh O'Donnell into the narrative, is strangely disjointing. The infanticide theme is a little overly gratuitous turning some of the concluding sequences into grotesque gothic melodrama. The Tarot theme, although original and captivating in the early part of the story, fails to develop or make sense at the conclusion, leading to a weak and unsatisfactory finish.
Throughout her novels Mosse spouts occasional lines from T.S.Eliot. ("Shape without form/ shade without colour/ hidden voices in the orchard", etc). Well, here's my contribution...
"The palaver is finished!"
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