3.95 AVERAGE

neekolxx's review

3.5
adventurous dark mysterious medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven: A mix
Strong character development: Yes
Loveable characters: Yes
Diverse cast of characters: Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus: Yes

looo90's review

2.0
slow-paced

drjeniferj's review

4.0

4.5
This book took me forever to get through. So brilliant and also so gruesome. So many historical intricacies and also trauma upon trauma. Definitely epic and entertaining.
adventurous dark hopeful tense medium-paced
emotional slow-paced

queergal's review

4.0

I'm reading this book because it recently occurred to me that the author of my favorite book has other books. I still think Power of One and Tandia are much better, but he's a great story teller.
adventurous challenging dark emotional funny informative mysterious reflective tense medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven: Plot
Strong character development: Yes
Loveable characters: Complicated
Diverse cast of characters: Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus: Yes

kimmerbellum's review

4.0

Just finished the audio version of this book. Brilliantly read and of course as usual excellent story telling from Courtenay. I am straight into Tommo and Hawk, which follows....

I find this a little hard to review because, while I enjoyed listening to it (this is for the Audiobook version), I also found it quite depressing. For the first 2/3 of the book there is no happiness, no light, no humanity! While times were obviously incredibly tough, particularly for the poor, I doubt there wasn't also love and humour despite all the hardships. Yet, the author only shares the horrors (and sometimes it really feels like an actual horror story) experienced by the main characters. And yet, I cared for the characters and I started to be invested in what happens to them. At the moment I'm not sure whether I'll listen to the second book in the series. First, I'll need something a bit more uplifting!

I very much enjoyed the part of this book that was set in London. However, once the main characters found themselves transported, the story began to seem disjointed, and the characters didn't seem to be as interconnected. It's also a very long book at 666 pages and occasionally I found my attention wandering. Nonetheless it's a good yarn despite the author's propensity to throw in the odd lecture on all manner of topics.