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3.14 AVERAGE
3.14 AVERAGE
I received a copy of this book through Goodreads First Reads.
I always have a hard time reviewing books I feel conflicted about. It’s so much easier to rant about a truly terrible book, or gush about a really great one, than it is to describe those books that fall solidly in the middle. I liked parts of Bellman and Black, but unfortunately I either disliked or felt indifferent towards a majority of it.
I guess I just expected this book to be different than what it actually was. It was atmospheric and ominous at times, as if something was looming just beyond the next page, but it never quite reached that level of creepiness I was waiting for. The sense of foreboding I felt throughout the first half of the book builds and builds until it just dissipates into nothing.
The writing was beautiful as well, but the plot sort of meanders along, and the amount of descriptive language concerning mill work and business minutiae makes George R. R. Martin’s books look concise. I could practically feel my eyes glazing over at times and I found myself frequently losing interest in the characters and the story. I did enjoy the parts that focused more on the people rather than the endless descriptions of Bellman’s work, but those parts were few and far between.
Overall, I was rather disappointed with this book. I think I understand where the author was trying to go with it, and I really wanted to love it, but I think she could have gone about it differently. On the plus side, the hardcover copy is seriously beautiful. The jacket has gorgeous colors and raised lettering and a lovely texture that I couldn’t help petting a few times. Even though I was disappointed with what was inside, at least it’ll look good on my shelf.
I always have a hard time reviewing books I feel conflicted about. It’s so much easier to rant about a truly terrible book, or gush about a really great one, than it is to describe those books that fall solidly in the middle. I liked parts of Bellman and Black, but unfortunately I either disliked or felt indifferent towards a majority of it.
I guess I just expected this book to be different than what it actually was. It was atmospheric and ominous at times, as if something was looming just beyond the next page, but it never quite reached that level of creepiness I was waiting for. The sense of foreboding I felt throughout the first half of the book builds and builds until it just dissipates into nothing.
The writing was beautiful as well, but the plot sort of meanders along, and the amount of descriptive language concerning mill work and business minutiae makes George R. R. Martin’s books look concise. I could practically feel my eyes glazing over at times and I found myself frequently losing interest in the characters and the story. I did enjoy the parts that focused more on the people rather than the endless descriptions of Bellman’s work, but those parts were few and far between.
Overall, I was rather disappointed with this book. I think I understand where the author was trying to go with it, and I really wanted to love it, but I think she could have gone about it differently. On the plus side, the hardcover copy is seriously beautiful. The jacket has gorgeous colors and raised lettering and a lovely texture that I couldn’t help petting a few times. Even though I was disappointed with what was inside, at least it’ll look good on my shelf.
Again, I curse that I don't note where I get my recs. I think this one came from EW. I started off reading this book just because I'd heard it recced from other places. I didn't know much at all about it and the book description doesn't give you much of a clue. It turns out the reason there's not much of a description is because there's not really much else actually to this story. A boy kills a bird when he's 10 or so. He grows up and runs a mill. A lot of people die. That's about it. The quality of the writing wasn't bad, but the story was extremely boring.
I don't remember liking The Thirteenth Tale overly much but I really enjoyed this one. One man's life haunted by... what? Kind of Poe-esque but not as gruesome. Just continual dread of something that colors everything, but is it real?
Too boring for the time being. I'm going to shelve this and come back to it....maybe.
very odd and entirely not what I expected in a ghost story.
A lot of readers seem to have been disappointed that Diane Setterfield's second book wasn't just like her first book. Yes, I loved "The Thirteenth Tale", but I enjoyed this very different story too. It is a study of a man who fears death so much that he works himself to death in an attempt to deny its existence. In doing this of course, he completely fails to live the life he has, with all its joys and sorrows. The story is set in Victorian England, but is just as relevant to the way in which people today fail to cherish the life and the relationships they have, and the beauty and wonder of the world around them. For him, the Rook is a bird of ill-omen.
As a stark contrast to Bellman's way of life, his artistic daughter Dora finds happiness and joy despite her physical weaknesses which resulted from a close brush with death in her childhood. At the end of the book, she is taken to see a huge gathering of Rooks settling for the night, and the description is stunning:
"Somewhere, invisibly, at the heart of the mass, a single rook readies its muscles. Now it flaps and rises. A thread of birds is drawn up, out of the mass, a line that rises, coiling and twisting into the dusky air. It thickens at its base, spirals up, and paints shapes on the sky: swirls and eddies, like black dye dropped into water. Endlessly and unexpectedly shifting, it is hard to believe that these are individual birds; it seems to be a single force that animates these fantastical forms in the sky.
The dark lake of birds shrinks as the black mass flows upwards from its centre, more and more joining the whirling dance flight until the last birds leave the ground and the entire parish is twisting and writhing as one force in the air. There is no time. Future and past are banished, and this moment is all."
A ghost story? Not in the conventional sense, but Bellman is for all that a haunted man, in terror of his own inevitable death.
As a stark contrast to Bellman's way of life, his artistic daughter Dora finds happiness and joy despite her physical weaknesses which resulted from a close brush with death in her childhood. At the end of the book, she is taken to see a huge gathering of Rooks settling for the night, and the description is stunning:
"Somewhere, invisibly, at the heart of the mass, a single rook readies its muscles. Now it flaps and rises. A thread of birds is drawn up, out of the mass, a line that rises, coiling and twisting into the dusky air. It thickens at its base, spirals up, and paints shapes on the sky: swirls and eddies, like black dye dropped into water. Endlessly and unexpectedly shifting, it is hard to believe that these are individual birds; it seems to be a single force that animates these fantastical forms in the sky.
The dark lake of birds shrinks as the black mass flows upwards from its centre, more and more joining the whirling dance flight until the last birds leave the ground and the entire parish is twisting and writhing as one force in the air. There is no time. Future and past are banished, and this moment is all."
A ghost story? Not in the conventional sense, but Bellman is for all that a haunted man, in terror of his own inevitable death.
I had this book on my radar for quite some time, and was only partially dissuaded by the mixed reviews due to the fact that a main part of the storyline has to do with rooks, relatives of the crows I love so well. We watch the protagonist's life from age 10 to finish as his bright mind and solid heart bring him love and great success, but we also see his family fall apart as death claims them little by little. I nearly stopped reading when the deaths began to really accumulate, mainly in that it was too terrible to imagine, but mercifully, Setterfield glossed over enough that I was able to soldier on. Still, it's definitely a melancholy Victorian in that respect; a good, talented man driven to nonstop work by tragedy, perhaps due to a youthful misdeed, perhaps only bad luck, endlessly doomed to never seeing true happiness again and only able to understand the phantom partner holding the reins until the very last. The writing is lovely, the details exquisite; still, the phrase "pain porn" has been tossed around as of late in regards to the consumption of the pain of others for one's own entertainment, and I think it's very applicable here-- this book is definitely one that unnecessarily worries that tragedy hangnail. It is also pointedly not a ghost story, nor is it as suspenseful as it is made out to be.
I'm not sorry to have read this, but I don't know that I'd read it again, and I can't imagine recommending it to anyone, save those who openly admire the tragic Victorian hero trope.
I'm not sorry to have read this, but I don't know that I'd read it again, and I can't imagine recommending it to anyone, save those who openly admire the tragic Victorian hero trope.