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4.23 AVERAGE
4.23 AVERAGE
dark
mysterious
tense
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
No
A readable book with enough intrigue and humor to keep me interested to the end. I wouldn't call it "Gabriel Garcia Marquez meets Jorge Luis Borges meets Umberto Eco" (the story's a little flat and contrived), but I enjoyed it for what it was. Somewhere between 3 and 4 stars.
How on earth had I not heard from this book before? Well, maybe because I don't usually read these kind of books and stay safely on my fantasy alley and I wouldn't have stumbled on this if my dad hadn't recommended this.
This book couldn't enjoy me through the whole book, but whenever it lost me, it slapped me on the face with new interesting points. Once you think you have it all figured out, nope, you don't. Great characters, great atmosphere and intensity to the max. I'm so glad I gave this book a chance and read it all the way to the end.
This book couldn't enjoy me through the whole book, but whenever it lost me, it slapped me on the face with new interesting points. Once you think you have it all figured out, nope, you don't. Great characters, great atmosphere and intensity to the max. I'm so glad I gave this book a chance and read it all the way to the end.
dark
emotional
hopeful
mysterious
tense
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
Wow! This book was not what I remembered at all. The writing was beautiful but there is so much misogyny in this book. I was originally going to downgrade my rating from 5 to 2 stars but I can't look past the misogyny and how poorly the female characters were represented and how horribly MALE a character Daniel is. There a classics written by men with better, kinder female representations than this book had. Just WOW! This was a nice reminder to stick to my policy of reading fiction by men only if they are dead and russian.
dark
emotional
mysterious
reflective
sad
tense
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
Simply the best book I read this year, amazing hard to put down
Welllll, I know this book is beloved, and I liked the story. This is where the "but" comes in. The writing was so flowery so over the top, so filled with baffling and absurdly mixed metaphors it was laughable. And the adjectives! So many adjectives. A landslide of arcane multi-syllabic adjectives in nearly every sentence. To say nothing of the the fact that half the adjectives were misused. "This egregious ass of yours" should indicate some sort of fart factory, or at least something lumpy, but it is followed by "is the revelation according to Botticelli." That word "egregious?" I do not think it means what he thinks it means. A few sentences later we get a baffling simile. Zafon states that an alley "looked and smelled like Hell's esophagus." What? I can go to any page in the book and find similarly wacky metaphors, similes, and misused words. I felt like I was drowning in them.
Another major beef, when the story did not go where the author intended, instead of rewriting to actually provide clues to help the reader solve the mystery, he just throws in a letter that basically tells the whole story in a sort of executive summary. This letter rehashes the first half of the book, adds some facts that were not previously revealed, and lays out the story in the way the author wanted you to understand it (rather than just writing the story correctly in a way that it would be understood by a typical reader.) This makes most of the first few hundred pages of the book meaningless.
I may come back here and write a more specific review, but I don't want to pile on to a book so many people I like, adore. For now I will just say that despite all its many flaws I enjoyed the book's unapologetic passion for literature, particularly Cervantes (whom I never much liked), Borges (but Borges' work is SO SO SO much better than this), and Eco (but Eco is SO SO SO much smarter than this author.) I also appreciated the story's essential sweetness, and the loving portrait of Barcelona, a city of which I am very fond, at a particular rather fraught moment in its history.
Another major beef, when the story did not go where the author intended, instead of rewriting to actually provide clues to help the reader solve the mystery, he just throws in a letter that basically tells the whole story in a sort of executive summary. This letter rehashes the first half of the book, adds some facts that were not previously revealed, and lays out the story in the way the author wanted you to understand it (rather than just writing the story correctly in a way that it would be understood by a typical reader.) This makes most of the first few hundred pages of the book meaningless.
I may come back here and write a more specific review, but I don't want to pile on to a book so many people I like, adore. For now I will just say that despite all its many flaws I enjoyed the book's unapologetic passion for literature, particularly Cervantes (whom I never much liked), Borges (but Borges' work is SO SO SO much better than this), and Eco (but Eco is SO SO SO much smarter than this author.) I also appreciated the story's essential sweetness, and the loving portrait of Barcelona, a city of which I am very fond, at a particular rather fraught moment in its history.
I was really into this book toward the beginning, and I was intrigued by the Cemetery of Forgotten Books. But as I read more and more of the book, I began to feel bored with the plot line. The story moves rather slowly, but I did enjoy the relationship between Daniel and Fermin over the course of the novel. I found Zafón's writing to be incredibly descriptive, which is great, but it made the book difficult to get through. By the end I just did not enjoy it enough to be interested in the resolution of the mystery.