joensign 's review for:

The Count of Monte Cristo [Abridged] by Alexandre Dumas

3.0

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Edmond Dantes is living a dream. At the mere age of twenty, he’s about to be promoted to the captain of the ship The Pharaon and within a few days, his beautiful fiancé, Mercedes, will become his wife. But despite being a loyal and worthy man, Dantes has some enemies. And they’ll stop at nothing to eliminate him. Even if it means creating an elaborate lie to label Dantes as a bonapartist. The day of Dantes wedding, he’s arrested for being a suspected bonapartist and is locked away in the dungeon of the Chateau d’If. Dantes is determined to get revenge on his three enemies, no matter how much it takes or how many it will hurt. Dumas has written a timeless adventure filled with twists and turns that will keep the reader on the edge of their seat.

Spoiler

So, I enjoyed this book more than I thought I would. My biggest critique would be that the adventure aspect was not as consistent as I would have liked it to be. Something exciting would happen, and then the chapter would end and the next chapter would move on to a different character’s story. Obviously this was a necessary tactic seeing as though we had a lot of characters to keep up with, but I personally found this disappointing and at times, even annoying. While I’m on the topic of characters, I should mention my opinion on the ending. I felt as though I didn’t get a lot of closure from the ending. Aside from any characters that died during the story, we only got solid closure from Valentine, Maxemillien, Haydee, and Edmond, which I was disappointed in. The closure we were offered for Albert, Danglars, Mercedes, etc, wasn’t really what I was hoping for. This complaint could, of course, stem from not the book itself but rather the edition I read. The edition I read was abridged and just under 550 pages, while tho original was over 1000 pages. So perhaps I could have found more closure in the original, or even in a longer edition. Finally, while I’m on the topic of the ending, I want to mention the fact that a lot of the character actually didn’t impact the ending. We encountered 70 some notable characters throughout the story, which was quite a lot to keep track of. But there were some that we really could have done without, in the long run. Characters drive the story, and not every character will have equal impact in the story, but I felt like some of them didn’t really contribute anything to the story, and it almost felt pointless to follow their story.
3.5 stars