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4.19 AVERAGE
4.19 AVERAGE
I absolutely loved this entire series of books. Years later, I still find myself thinking about the characters.
Det var hyggeligt igen at stifte bekendskab med "Giganternes fald". Solid, historisk fiktion.
Not as good as Pillars of the Earth! I really would have given it more stars if it was about 250 pages shorter....it was unnecessarily long. I started skimming at the end. However, I feel like I've had a course on WWI and it was fascinating. Follett does an amazing job of taking real life facts and weaving fictional characters into the story. Good reading if you are a buff of WWI.
I used to read Ken Follett years ago and I recall liking him...had high hopes for this. But oh my how horrible, I find it hard to believe how many people just adored it. The writing was abysmal, amateurish and full of exposition...it was like the characters were reading aloud to each other from Wikipedia. Which shows that he is assuming his readers have no historical knowledge, but there are far more skillful ways of slipping information in then with ridiculously unrealistic dialogue. I bogged down in this long before the end, but from reading (the bad) reviews I see that it didn't get any better, probably worse.
This series is a great crash course on history, told through personal stories, which helps it come alive. There is a lot of explicit sex, verging into the territory of soft porn, which I did not think added to the story, but I’m not a romance novel fan. It feels like Forrest Gump, where the characters just happen to be at all the major historical points at the right time, but it is entertaining.
Although I was initially very very gripped by this book and did enjoy it all the way through, especially the interweaving of history and fiction, I did not find myself really really wanting to read it all the time. Perhaps it's because some of the history is familiar so I didn't feel like I needed to carry on to know what was going to happen but this is probably also because most of the relationships were fairly poorly developed so I wasn't particularly invested at the start. On top of this, a lot of what happened was fairly predictable; all the main characters have a fairly happy ending and none of them die, the pregnancy storyline was used several times in a very similar way and the people who are portrayed as good win out, while those we are encouraged to dislike suffer in some way. It was a good book, but I struggled to motivate myself to read all 900 pages by the end
I put off reading this book - I mean it's almost 1,000 pages and the description sounded so confusing and hard to follow. I COULD NOT HAVE BEEN MORE MISTAKEN. The characters leap off the pages, the prose is wonderful and not overwhelming to read, the stories so well interwoven and told that you start reading and the next thing you know, you've read 150 pages. It is my first, but certainly will NOT be my last book by Follett. Book 2 of the triolgy is already on hold at the library.
Woahhhh ! Je vais avoir du mal à sortir de cette histoire tant on croirait que les personnages sont réels. Les protagonistes de cette histoire sont d'ailleurs mêlés à des personnages réels tels que Churchill ou Lloyd. C'est fou comme Ken Follet parvient à surfer sur ce qui s'est réellement passé pour créer une fiction à laquelle on veut croire. Je recommande chaudement!
challenging
informative
inspiring
tense
slow-paced
I loved Pillars of the Earth and couldn't wait to start reading this new series, but I was disappointed. While it kept me entertained for several days, I found the political aspects boring and wish more of the story was told through the characters actions then dry discussions with each other about politics. It was like Follet felt he needed to fill the reader in on events, so characters had long political discussions instead of just living and being affected by the world around them. Because of this, I didn't always feel like I got a taste for the time period. It almost seemed like two different authors-one who wrote the history and one who wrote the character's stories in that the history was dry but the characters were interesting. I'm not sure I'd recommend spending your time reading these 1,000 pages. However, I'm curious to read the next one only because I want to know more about the characters (and know more about WW II so hopefully the history won't seem as textbook-like). I did like that he covered WW I from many different fronts but the characters crossed borders so easily that it was sometimes hard to keep track of where they were. If this was my first Follet book, I think I would not have ever picked up Pillars of the Earth so I'm glad I read that (and World Without End) first.