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ryuutchi 's review for:
A Song of Shadows
by John Connolly
Definitely NOT my favorite of the Charlie Parker books.
It's, as always, tightly plotted and well written, with some little hints dropped about the greater universe, but... it's also a book about Nazis written by a non-Jewish, non-Rromani author, and that's always a crapshoot. There were no Jewish POV characters, just a bunch of dead Jewish bodies. OTOH the Nazis got some definite sympathetic "well I've been NOT a Nazi for 70 years, doesn't that count for something?" POV bits. The revelation at the end (which, honestly, I was waiting for) just added that one last twist of the 'the Jews don't actually matter in the grand scheme of this story ostensibly about Jews' knife.
I would have been much happier if Connolly had done for Rabbi Epstein in this book what he did for Louis in The Reapers-- give him a book about his community, and his night horrors. Connolly's done some very sensitive writing on US race relations (for a white Irish man writing a horror thriller series), but none of that sensitivity was evident in this book, and that was a shame.
It's, as always, tightly plotted and well written, with some little hints dropped about the greater universe, but... it's also a book about Nazis written by a non-Jewish, non-Rromani author, and that's always a crapshoot. There were no Jewish POV characters, just a bunch of dead Jewish bodies. OTOH the Nazis got some definite sympathetic "well I've been NOT a Nazi for 70 years, doesn't that count for something?" POV bits. The revelation at the end (which, honestly, I was waiting for) just added that one last twist of the 'the Jews don't actually matter in the grand scheme of this story ostensibly about Jews' knife.
I would have been much happier if Connolly had done for Rabbi Epstein in this book what he did for Louis in The Reapers-- give him a book about his community, and his night horrors. Connolly's done some very sensitive writing on US race relations (for a white Irish man writing a horror thriller series), but none of that sensitivity was evident in this book, and that was a shame.