Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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32 of 35 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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129 of 146 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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23 of 26 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
What a letdown, 15 April 2008
I read Labyrinth a couple of years ago and thought it was a great holiday read, not as good as you'd expect from the article raving about it in the Observer, but good all the same. This one, howevever - what a disappointment. Especially since it showed such promise, the ingredients of Tarot, Debussy, big old haunted English country house, ladies in corsets and treasure hunts - sounded so good in theory but just failed miserably on the page. The modern day plot just seemed like a convenient add on to the turn of the century plot, Uncle Julian was a ridiculous villain, Meredith and Hal seemed to have come straight from one of those romantic books for girls in their early teens, "He ran a hand through his thick wavy hair" etc etc. The other plot with Leonie and Anatole started well but finished badly with its ludicrous climax in the sepulchre where all the spirits rise up from the cards and do their worst. It was all just so... silly and disappointing, esp since i love a good old Victorian melodrama, but compare this to something like Fingersmith, just doesn't come near it. Or the Time Travellers Wife or even Nina Beachcroft's Cold Christmas, which I read as a child and haunted me for years! It all seemed very contrived and rather like a GCSCE English Language essay. I wish someone else could have taken the ingredients and had a proper go at this, seems a bit too much like Kate Mosse plotted the story on her lunchbreak in between Neighbours and Countdown.
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