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A review by littlealk7
Citadel by Kate Mosse
4.0
I am not quite sure where to begin, so here goes. It took me forever to start reading this book. I would pick it up and try so hard to get past the prologue and I just couldn't do it. Months went by. A year passed. Still, every time I tried, nothing made sense and it didn't hook me right away. Then I had a baby and needed something to read one night while I was awake with him. I though "hey, let me download the sample of that book I've been trying to read, and maybe I'll get through it since I have nothing else to do while this baby eats and sleeps!"
I'm so glad I did that. Once you get past that beginning bit, those 700 remaining pages just fly by. I took off a star for two reasons. First, the difficultly getting into it, but second, another issue in general that I have is the style of Kate Mosse's descriptive sections. The paragraphs of sentence fragments were difficult for me to get through.
The dialogue in the book, however, is excellent, as many other reviewers pointed out, and I actually enjoyed the jumps back to 342 AD (the book is mostly set in German occupied France during WW2). Mosse did a beautiful job paralleling the two stories, and subtly tying them together. I disagree with all the reviewers who said that they thought she had enough of a story without the codex sections. Those parts added a dimension to the book that made the supernatural aspect of it a bit more palatable, so I think it actually played a very important role
I'm not sure how I feel about the end, but it touched me deeply such that, as I sit here and watch my baby boy sleep, I'm playing the last few chapters over and over in my mind hoping that such war and destruction of a people is never part of his life.
This is my first Kate Mosse book, and I plan to read more of her work after this. If the other books are better, as others have indicated, I'm excited!
I'm so glad I did that. Once you get past that beginning bit, those 700 remaining pages just fly by. I took off a star for two reasons. First, the difficultly getting into it, but second, another issue in general that I have is the style of Kate Mosse's descriptive sections. The paragraphs of sentence fragments were difficult for me to get through.
The dialogue in the book, however, is excellent, as many other reviewers pointed out, and I actually enjoyed the jumps back to 342 AD (the book is mostly set in German occupied France during WW2). Mosse did a beautiful job paralleling the two stories, and subtly tying them together. I disagree with all the reviewers who said that they thought she had enough of a story without the codex sections. Those parts added a dimension to the book that made the supernatural aspect of it a bit more palatable, so I think it actually played a very important role
I'm not sure how I feel about the end, but it touched me deeply such that, as I sit here and watch my baby boy sleep, I'm playing the last few chapters over and over in my mind hoping that such war and destruction of a people is never part of his life.
This is my first Kate Mosse book, and I plan to read more of her work after this. If the other books are better, as others have indicated, I'm excited!