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A review by gigishank
The Hourglass Factory by Lucy Ribchester
1.0
DNF. Found it hard going. Never wanted to pick it up again and keep reading. Why?
"Ebony Diamond had waited in the dark her wrists bound tight as shoelaces." As I tried to picture this, I thought she was tied up. So while reading, you make a picture in your mind of what you are experiencing, but turns out I was wrong.
"...keep your arms in or you'll lose one of them...once at the Crystal Palace a trapeze artist had landed so sharply on a falling jolt that part of his brain seeped out through his nose." Well, what does arms have to do with hitting your head?
I guess what I'm saying is that I had to keep re-reading even the most casual of sentences, trying to picture what the author was describing.
So it describes Ebony as jumping, then it cuts to a newspaper character watching a story come in on the newspaper tape. He is described as watching the details come in, and describes how the facts change, the Prime Minister is dead, the prime minister is alive, etc etc. But the book never tells you what actually happened. It skips forward.
Apparently 2 suffragettes pulled a stunt, using a trapeze, to display a banner over the prime minister during a speech.
But we leave that behind, and now comes the chapter on what must be the main character. She is a newswoman in 1912. She is sent to a corset shop for a story. She notices the proprietor had something odd about him. "...she realised what was so odd about the man. He was corseted to a gruesome size; fourteen and a half, fifteen inches."
So again, stop, what? I think the words gruesome size, is a poor choice. Gruesome size, to me, means BIG. So again, just trying to read the book and form a picture, I get stopped. What does "corseted to a gruesome size" mean? He was so cinched at the waist it was unnatural? I had to readjust the picture in my head, after careful analysis not just of the words, but of what they were trying to convey.
Just using these examples to show why I found it so tiring to try to read this book, and gave up.
"Ebony Diamond had waited in the dark her wrists bound tight as shoelaces." As I tried to picture this, I thought she was tied up. So while reading, you make a picture in your mind of what you are experiencing, but turns out I was wrong.
"...keep your arms in or you'll lose one of them...once at the Crystal Palace a trapeze artist had landed so sharply on a falling jolt that part of his brain seeped out through his nose." Well, what does arms have to do with hitting your head?
I guess what I'm saying is that I had to keep re-reading even the most casual of sentences, trying to picture what the author was describing.
So it describes Ebony as jumping, then it cuts to a newspaper character watching a story come in on the newspaper tape. He is described as watching the details come in, and describes how the facts change, the Prime Minister is dead, the prime minister is alive, etc etc. But the book never tells you what actually happened. It skips forward.
Apparently 2 suffragettes pulled a stunt, using a trapeze, to display a banner over the prime minister during a speech.
But we leave that behind, and now comes the chapter on what must be the main character. She is a newswoman in 1912. She is sent to a corset shop for a story. She notices the proprietor had something odd about him. "...she realised what was so odd about the man. He was corseted to a gruesome size; fourteen and a half, fifteen inches."
So again, stop, what? I think the words gruesome size, is a poor choice. Gruesome size, to me, means BIG. So again, just trying to read the book and form a picture, I get stopped. What does "corseted to a gruesome size" mean? He was so cinched at the waist it was unnatural? I had to readjust the picture in my head, after careful analysis not just of the words, but of what they were trying to convey.
Just using these examples to show why I found it so tiring to try to read this book, and gave up.