A review by ginnykaczmarek
The Shadow in the North by Philip Pullman

2.0

I really wanted to like this one. It seems like just my kind of thing: a Philip Pullman novel about a female detective in Victorian England with magicians and seances and murder. But I got about halfway through and just do not care to finish. This book takes so many deep dives into dull Victorian minutiae (accounting practices, international shipping business, early photography, stagecraft) that the plot gets lost. The result is a dry dump of nonessential information between bits of intrigue. (To be fair, maybe all that info is leading somewhere, but ugh.) On top of that, the main characters' constant squabbles, which I think are supposed to read like they're falling for one another, feel like listening to your most irritating friends argue ad nauseam.

I'm a pretty patient reader who likes a broad range of books, but this one bored me. Bummer!