Take a photo of a barcode or cover
zephyrsilver 's review for:
The Dante Club
by Matthew Pearl
DID NOT FINISH
I just couldn't get into this book at all. I got about maybe seventy pages in before I decided I didn't really want to read it anymore.
A lot of the beginning also seemed to happen way too quickly and I missed a lot of it - or maybe I wasn't paying attention. Despite the really gruesome murder though, the story spent a good deal of time with some egotistical old, white men who talked about Dante a lot. I get that the book is "The Dante Club", but I wasn't seeing yet how they connected to the murder, and it was just so abrupt to go from such an intense murder, to such a boring club. It's super boring despite being a murder mystery.
Plus, I kept getting a lot of the characters confused. All of them were famous poets, I believe. Or maybe just one of them. I don't remember. They all sort of blended into each other.
A weird issue I had was some of their names though. One was named Holmes, which I get is a rather normal name, but it still felt a bit like Pearl specifically named him Holmes after Sherlock Holmes. And another character was named George Washington Something (I don't remember his last name). Pearl deliberately named these characters after famous people. It's weird. Unless, of course, these people actually were real people, in which case please disregard this paragraph.
I just have too many other books to read that I didn't feel like getting much farther into this one.
A lot of the beginning also seemed to happen way too quickly and I missed a lot of it - or maybe I wasn't paying attention. Despite the really gruesome murder though, the story spent a good deal of time with some egotistical old, white men who talked about Dante a lot. I get that the book is "The Dante Club", but I wasn't seeing yet how they connected to the murder, and it was just so abrupt to go from such an intense murder, to such a boring club. It's super boring despite being a murder mystery.
Plus, I kept getting a lot of the characters confused. All of them were famous poets, I believe. Or maybe just one of them. I don't remember. They all sort of blended into each other.
A weird issue I had was some of their names though. One was named Holmes, which I get is a rather normal name, but it still felt a bit like Pearl specifically named him Holmes after Sherlock Holmes. And another character was named George Washington Something (I don't remember his last name). Pearl deliberately named these characters after famous people. It's weird. Unless, of course, these people actually were real people, in which case please disregard this paragraph.
I just have too many other books to read that I didn't feel like getting much farther into this one.