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3.13 AVERAGE
3.13 AVERAGE
This week I also read Bellman & Black by Diane Setterfield. It was my pick for our St. Stephen's Episcopal Church book club. I'm afraid I'm about to be voted off the island out of book club.
I have waited for years for her second book. I absolutely loved The Thirteenth Tale, and it was one of my all-time favorite books. But Bellman & Black falls way short of the touted ghost story it is supposed to be. I don't think it in any way represents that genre.
William Bellman makes a mistake as a young boy. When he is ten, he shoots and kills a young rook with his slingshot. An impossible shot, the parabola linking himself to the bird is flawless. Skip ahead a few years, and William is working in a mill he'll eventually own. But when he loses almost his entire family to illness, he strikes up a deal with a mysterious man to save his remaining daughter. As a result, he becomes and obsessive-compulsive manager, and embarks on a quest to create the quintessential Victorian mourning emporium and Bellman & Black is born.
What disappointed me so much about this book is Setterfield's exhaustingly lengthy description of Victorian textile mills and Bellman's OCD obsession with his Bellman & Black business. That's pretty much the gist of the book: description after (boring) description, and the story is totally lost. There are a few interesting breaks from the descriptions with these little personified blurbs about rooks. I had no idea that there are so many collective nouns for rooks! Maybe if Setterfield had focused on the Victorians' obsession with the dark and middle ages, occult, and funeral practices of the Celts (which she did barely touch upon) it might have made for a better story.
The only way I would recommend this book to anyone is if he or she wants to learn more about how a Victorian mill was run or about the Victorian mourning process. I really wanted to like this book. And my book club members are not going to be happy with me. I dread our meeting this morning!
I have waited for years for her second book. I absolutely loved The Thirteenth Tale, and it was one of my all-time favorite books. But Bellman & Black falls way short of the touted ghost story it is supposed to be. I don't think it in any way represents that genre.
William Bellman makes a mistake as a young boy. When he is ten, he shoots and kills a young rook with his slingshot. An impossible shot, the parabola linking himself to the bird is flawless. Skip ahead a few years, and William is working in a mill he'll eventually own. But when he loses almost his entire family to illness, he strikes up a deal with a mysterious man to save his remaining daughter. As a result, he becomes and obsessive-compulsive manager, and embarks on a quest to create the quintessential Victorian mourning emporium and Bellman & Black is born.
What disappointed me so much about this book is Setterfield's exhaustingly lengthy description of Victorian textile mills and Bellman's OCD obsession with his Bellman & Black business. That's pretty much the gist of the book: description after (boring) description, and the story is totally lost. There are a few interesting breaks from the descriptions with these little personified blurbs about rooks. I had no idea that there are so many collective nouns for rooks! Maybe if Setterfield had focused on the Victorians' obsession with the dark and middle ages, occult, and funeral practices of the Celts (which she did barely touch upon) it might have made for a better story.
The only way I would recommend this book to anyone is if he or she wants to learn more about how a Victorian mill was run or about the Victorian mourning process. I really wanted to like this book. And my book club members are not going to be happy with me. I dread our meeting this morning!
dark
mysterious
sad
medium-paced
Honestly, I'm struggling to even give it an "okay" rating--and the only reason I'm doing so is because Ms. Setterfield's talent with words is still apparent and I truly appreciate her gifted writing. However, after waiting years since her debut novel for her to come out with a second, Bellman and Black was such a sorry disappointment. It's so rare that I find books that I truly enjoy (and her book The Thirteenth Tale was SO very well done!) that I wanted to love this book before I even opened it. Sadly, it's a dull storyline that goes on far too long, and one of the things I had appreciated about The Thirteenth Tale was my inability to guess the ending--and in Bellman and Black this was NOT the case. So, it was a disappointing, dull, and predictable story (even if technically well-written). I wanted to love it, but I just can't.
I thoroughly enjoyed this book; in fact, I read it all in one sitting. I love Diane Setterfield's writing, which is why I wanted to read this. Other people describe the story as creepy and I guess it's been labeled a ghost story (not on the book itself though). I reserved judgment on that until the end in case something spooky happened, but I kind of understood what would be revealed and to me it's ultimately less about being eerie and much more a sad story of a man's life and how he chose to use his time. I don't want to spoil anything, but the message I got from the story is a very important lesson about what it is to really live your life.
dark
mysterious
sad
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
Giving this novel two stars breaks my heart because I LOVE Setterfield’s other books, but Bellman & Black simply didn’t create the same eeriness as The Thirteenth Tale and Once Upon A River did.
This is supposed to be a ghost story, and knowing her previous works I didn’t expect it to be a typical ghost story but I also didn’t expect it to be a book mainly about the workings of a mill and other business shenanigans. The frustrating thing is that I could see the story I wanted to read hidden behind long and unnecessary descriptions of different kinds of wools. When the interesting part of the story did receive attention, it felt rushed and all efforts to build suspense fell flat.
I will still read everything this woman writes, but this was definitely a miss for me.
This is supposed to be a ghost story, and knowing her previous works I didn’t expect it to be a typical ghost story but I also didn’t expect it to be a book mainly about the workings of a mill and other business shenanigans. The frustrating thing is that I could see the story I wanted to read hidden behind long and unnecessary descriptions of different kinds of wools. When the interesting part of the story did receive attention, it felt rushed and all efforts to build suspense fell flat.
I will still read everything this woman writes, but this was definitely a miss for me.
I was so disappointed in this book. I loved The Thirteenth Tale, but this one just did not measure up.
What a frustrating book! I thought that [b:The Thirteenth Tale|40440|The Thirteenth Tale|Diane Setterfield|https://d202m5krfqbpi5.cloudfront.net/books/1346267826s/40440.jpg|849453] was absolutely brilliant; it's truly a favorite of mine, and I don't deeply love many books any more. As I tried to settle into Bellman & Black, I could only come back to the thought, over and over again, that it was the polar opposite of Setterfield's previous novel.
That's not to say that there weren't parts of it that were beautiful. There were several passages that I paused to savor, and so I would say that the writing is still absolutely lovely, but the plot, the characters, were just utter failures for me. William Bellman's constant, pushing activity was so frenetic (especially in the latter part of the book) that I was actually getting anxious reading it. Some of the few excellent parts of the book capture exactly the contrast of his actions and some of the side characters actually, you know, enjoying life, so in a way the book works, but it's not a pleasant read, and it's not really a revelation either. If you could have anyone's story, why on earth would you choose Bellman's? I am baffled.
P.S. I don't get it. Should I read it again? Did I miss something?
That's not to say that there weren't parts of it that were beautiful. There were several passages that I paused to savor, and so I would say that the writing is still absolutely lovely, but the plot, the characters, were just utter failures for me. William Bellman's constant, pushing activity was so frenetic (especially in the latter part of the book) that I was actually getting anxious reading it. Some of the few excellent parts of the book capture exactly the contrast of his actions and some of the side characters actually, you know, enjoying life, so in a way the book works, but it's not a pleasant read, and it's not really a revelation either. If you could have anyone's story, why on earth would you choose Bellman's? I am baffled.
P.S. I don't get it. Should I read it again? Did I miss something?
2,5
Velmi slibny namet, ze ktereho se dalo vytriskat strasne moc, coz se ale nepovedlo. Celou dobu si rikate, kdy se to rozjede - a nic. Pritom ma autorka solidni styl, cetlo se to dobre, zejmena casti popisujici chod tovarny a obchodu byly zajimave a ctive.
Velmi slibny namet, ze ktereho se dalo vytriskat strasne moc, coz se ale nepovedlo. Celou dobu si rikate, kdy se to rozjede - a nic. Pritom ma autorka solidni styl, cetlo se to dobre, zejmena casti popisujici chod tovarny a obchodu byly zajimave a ctive.