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alcoholicjedi 's review for:
The Three Muskateers
by Alexandre Dumas
It's hard to review a book like this as the writing itself, chapter to chapter, is quite good. The metaphors, the magniloquence, the jokes all land quite effectively. But that just isn't enough to cover the fact that almost every character is jolly while being deplorable. A huge schism is created between the jovial nature in which murder, war, borderline rape, treason, brutish behavior, etc are all conveyed.
The book should lean into a more candide-esque fantasy or just aim to promote nihilism. As it is you mostly only care for the ancillary characters who all end up being mindless idiots and victims of the machinations of the protagonists.
Ultimately it just made it difficult to care about the broad scope of the plot as the main characters didn't. Then conversely it became hard to care about those characters as they didn't seem to care about the (seemingly) serious nature of the story's plot.
The book should lean into a more candide-esque fantasy or just aim to promote nihilism. As it is you mostly only care for the ancillary characters who all end up being mindless idiots and victims of the machinations of the protagonists.
Ultimately it just made it difficult to care about the broad scope of the plot as the main characters didn't. Then conversely it became hard to care about those characters as they didn't seem to care about the (seemingly) serious nature of the story's plot.