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avram 's review for:
The Daughter of Time
by Josephine Tey
Despite The Daughter of Time being a mere 206 pages, it was such a slog to get through. This was mostly because the book could have easily been made into a more compact essay and been so much more interesting and readable.
The pitch of this book is that an investigator solves a 500 year old crime and "proves" that Richard III didn't kill the princes in the tower. But, the book isn't very successful as a mystery. We already know the conclusion of the author from the beginning: that Richard III didn't do it, so that angle of the story is of little interest to me. The more interesting parts of the book are its reflections on the nature of history and historical fact finding.
Ultimately though, I wonder if these individual interesting points are enough to sustain a whole novel that is essentially characterless and plotless. The duration of the book is spent wondering about who did it, and yet that is obvious to the reader the whole time; the experience of reading it then is mostly to watch how the investigators draw their conclusions. This to me wasn't sustainable because the characters aren't developed enough to excuse the lack of investigative momentum. Vague etchings of character and setting dance around the edges of this book's pages, but in the end the author's focus is on drawing out this tedious mystery and following an overlong string of dry facts.
It's a unique book that I might recommend to someone interested in the subject, however it really was difficult to get through and I would be fine never reading it again.
The pitch of this book is that an investigator solves a 500 year old crime and "proves" that Richard III didn't kill the princes in the tower. But, the book isn't very successful as a mystery. We already know the conclusion of the author from the beginning: that Richard III didn't do it, so that angle of the story is of little interest to me. The more interesting parts of the book are its reflections on the nature of history and historical fact finding.
Ultimately though, I wonder if these individual interesting points are enough to sustain a whole novel that is essentially characterless and plotless. The duration of the book is spent wondering about who did it, and yet that is obvious to the reader the whole time; the experience of reading it then is mostly to watch how the investigators draw their conclusions. This to me wasn't sustainable because the characters aren't developed enough to excuse the lack of investigative momentum. Vague etchings of character and setting dance around the edges of this book's pages, but in the end the author's focus is on drawing out this tedious mystery and following an overlong string of dry facts.
It's a unique book that I might recommend to someone interested in the subject, however it really was difficult to get through and I would be fine never reading it again.