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mikavon 's review for:
World Without End
by Ken Follett
It was good, but I felt it was a bit too similar to the first book...
Characters were sort of the same archetypes. You have the super nice genius architect who aspires to build the biggest/best ____ in England. Merphin was a bit more sexually charged than Jack (actually, this book seemed to have more sex in general compared to the first book), but he was essentially the same sort of guy. He even went off to a foreign country for a while and became super successful in his trace and had a relationship with someone other than his love interest. Charris was pretty much identical to Aliena--independent woman who is smart and thinks differently from other women of her time and wants to rise above her lot in life and is a genius at business. The antagonist this time around was a bit easier to sympathize with simply because her was Merphin's brother, but he acted pretty much identically to the bad guy in the first book (raping people below him, abusing power, etc). Oh and the rough peasant girl Gwenda, she was sort of like the rough forest woman (Jack's mother) from book 1. Sort of. That similarity is more of a stretch than the others.
Not to say that it wasn't a fun read, because it was. It just felt like I'd read it before.
The plague dynamic was interesting, though. It's hard to imagine their mindset, having absolutely no idea how the plague transmits or how to treat it... so you immediately root for Charris and her "radical" methods. But I wonder if a person like that could have actually existed in times like that. People were pretty backwards back then...
So, 3 stars, because I really liked it but it was too similar to the first book to get 4 stars from me.
Characters were sort of the same archetypes. You have the super nice genius architect who aspires to build the biggest/best ____ in England. Merphin was a bit more sexually charged than Jack (actually, this book seemed to have more sex in general compared to the first book), but he was essentially the same sort of guy. He even went off to a foreign country for a while and became super successful in his trace and had a relationship with someone other than his love interest. Charris was pretty much identical to Aliena--independent woman who is smart and thinks differently from other women of her time and wants to rise above her lot in life and is a genius at business. The antagonist this time around was a bit easier to sympathize with simply because her was Merphin's brother, but he acted pretty much identically to the bad guy in the first book (raping people below him, abusing power, etc). Oh and the rough peasant girl Gwenda, she was sort of like the rough forest woman (Jack's mother) from book 1. Sort of. That similarity is more of a stretch than the others.
Not to say that it wasn't a fun read, because it was. It just felt like I'd read it before.
The plague dynamic was interesting, though. It's hard to imagine their mindset, having absolutely no idea how the plague transmits or how to treat it... so you immediately root for Charris and her "radical" methods. But I wonder if a person like that could have actually existed in times like that. People were pretty backwards back then...
So, 3 stars, because I really liked it but it was too similar to the first book to get 4 stars from me.