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3.7 AVERAGE
3.7 AVERAGE
challenging
emotional
mysterious
reflective
sad
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Complicated
emotional
mysterious
reflective
slow-paced
This is a great story, but I did not fully appreciate before going into it how many separate stories and perspectives there would be before they were finally tied together I also generally go not read a book that doesn’t tie into a nice bow at the end. This lays the foundation, but allows you to assume the ending. It’s not laid out explicitly.
Lovely writing and I liked the imagery and characters, although perhaps a little jarring with the time leaps. However, the end is.... just, ugh.
I was so into this book when everything started coming together in the last half. I was thinking “now, we’re getting somewhere!” But no, I was wrong. The ending is less than satisfactory.
I was so into this book when everything started coming together in the last half. I was thinking “now, we’re getting somewhere!” But no, I was wrong. The ending is less than satisfactory.
Like Kate Morton, I am also fascinated by time and timelessness. The idea underlying The Clockmaker’s Daughter is intriguing. The difficulty in loving this book is that the large cast of characters combined with the back and forth through time interferes with the flow of the novel.
Oh how I love Kate Morton. I don't know why, but I just can't put her down. It was a pretty clean read, which was much appreciated. Although I found the ending confusing - was everything explained or did I miss something??
3.5 stars. I've read other books by Kate Morton before and loved them, and I wasn't disappointed in this book at all. It jumps between periods in time, between third-and first-person voice, and between characters as narrators, all things I love in books. The story was compelling and the mystery was engaging. The only challenge I had was the author's writing of dialogue. I found dialogue between characters to be stilted, poorly written, and not believable. In the scenes without dialogue the prose was smooth and compelling, but the dialogue was really disruptive to the flow of the narration. Overall, a good read and I'll probably come back to this one again.
Once I could wrap my head around all the characters and different time periods, I couldn’t stop reading. Thoroughly confusing before I got it all straight though.
emotional
mysterious
sad
slow-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:
Complicated
Very slow, but good once you get through it.
I approached this book with some trepidation after reading a number of disappointed reviews. While I was mildly annoyed at the repeated use of "for" as a conjunction, meaning because (it's awkwardly formal and can get confusing), I really enjoyed it. I found it engaging and emotional and really very lovely.
So I am a Kate Morton faithful and always will be. However, this was an odd one and probably my least favorite by her. The writing is amazing in parts but I felt it was much slower to develop and the various stories seemed quite disjointed until the very end. While I wanted to know what happened, the bringing together of the storylines in the end just wasn’t satisfying enough to resolve the confusion I felt for the duration.