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A review by autumnxdays
The Book of Mirrors by E.O. Chirovici
2.0
[b:The Book of Mirrors|29905588|The Book of Mirrors|E.O. Chirovici|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1473247066s/29905588.jpg|47192843] had a lot of potential. Peter Katz is a literacy agent who receives an unfinished manuscript. This manuscript is a memoir written by Richard Flynn detailing his time at Princeton in the late 80's and his relationship with Professor Joseph Wieder who happened to be brutally murdered in his home. The case was never solved. Peter Katz wants to get to the bottom of what happened that night twenty five years before and goes after the finished manuscript. It sounds really interesting, doesn't it? Unfortunately it wasn't as interesting as it should have been.
This book is split into three parts. The first narrated by Peter, the second by John, a journalist, and the third by Roy, a retired policeman who worked the original case and wants to finally solve the case. I liked the idea of it being narrated by three different characters who have three different perspectives and different motivations but they all sounded exactly the same. I often found myself forgetting who the narrator was and getting a bit lost. There was no variation to the narration at all. It made it quite difficult to get into and stick with too. It also didn't help that the formatting wasn't great. Capital letters were hardly ever used.
I feel there was an attempt to flesh out background characters but unfortunately this came in the form of a fact dump. Often when characters were introduced, even if they didn't stick around long, it came with a list of facts for example that the character was married, had worked as a certain thing and liked to do a certain hobby. The only point of these facts, I felt, was to say 'hey, my characters are well-rounded! I know everything about them. They're real characters!
The idea of memories and how they can't be trusted, how people can remember things one way when an event happened differently and all that is interesting in theory but the rest of the book made me lose interest.
I can see this book appealing to other people but it just wasn't for me I'm afraid.
Thank you to NetGalley for providing a free digital copy.
This book is split into three parts. The first narrated by Peter, the second by John, a journalist, and the third by Roy, a retired policeman who worked the original case and wants to finally solve the case. I liked the idea of it being narrated by three different characters who have three different perspectives and different motivations but they all sounded exactly the same. I often found myself forgetting who the narrator was and getting a bit lost. There was no variation to the narration at all. It made it quite difficult to get into and stick with too. It also didn't help that the formatting wasn't great. Capital letters were hardly ever used.
I feel there was an attempt to flesh out background characters but unfortunately this came in the form of a fact dump. Often when characters were introduced, even if they didn't stick around long, it came with a list of facts for example that the character was married, had worked as a certain thing and liked to do a certain hobby. The only point of these facts, I felt, was to say 'hey, my characters are well-rounded! I know everything about them. They're real characters!
The idea of memories and how they can't be trusted, how people can remember things one way when an event happened differently and all that is interesting in theory but the rest of the book made me lose interest.
I can see this book appealing to other people but it just wasn't for me I'm afraid.
Thank you to NetGalley for providing a free digital copy.