Take a photo of a barcode or cover
kallsie 's review for:
The Winemaker's Wife
by Kristin Harmel
Disclaimer: I got an advance reader's copy from NetGalley in exchange for a fair and honest review.
I've said it before, but it bears repeating... I don't like giving or reading 3 star reviews. It's so hard to accurately convey how one feels about a book without the benefit of half stars!
At first I was fairly certain I was going to either DNF this or skim through it and give it a pretty low rating. Mostly this stems from the fact that none of the characters are terribly well fleshed out, maybe three protagonists was a wee bit much?! Or maybe it was because Ines and Céline were just too conveniently polar opposites of one and other; one a spoiled young woman with no awareness of what really happens in war and the other a perfect, selfless angel.
Also though the novel is set partially in 1943 in occupied France I feel like Harmel only superficially touched upon what living in this time and in this place would have been like. And though wine is central in the lives of the characters I feel like grape growing, and wine making didn't get the page time they deserved. Setting-wise I feel like caves and brasseries were over represented... I wanted descriptions of grapevines for as one can see, the smells; dry, green, ripe, whatever!
Liv our contemporary heroine was also poorly fleshed out. Other than her biography which we learn in her first chapter we don't know anything about her career, her likes, dislikes, aspirations.
The plot 'twists' were rather obvious when they were finally revealed, and yet I did find myself getting a little weepy in the end, so Harmel is clearly doing something write...
I like time shift novels, I do, maybe just with more thrills thrown in.
I've said it before, but it bears repeating... I don't like giving or reading 3 star reviews. It's so hard to accurately convey how one feels about a book without the benefit of half stars!
At first I was fairly certain I was going to either DNF this or skim through it and give it a pretty low rating. Mostly this stems from the fact that none of the characters are terribly well fleshed out, maybe three protagonists was a wee bit much?! Or maybe it was because Ines and Céline were just too conveniently polar opposites of one and other; one a spoiled young woman with no awareness of what really happens in war and the other a perfect, selfless angel.
Also though the novel is set partially in 1943 in occupied France I feel like Harmel only superficially touched upon what living in this time and in this place would have been like. And though wine is central in the lives of the characters I feel like grape growing, and wine making didn't get the page time they deserved. Setting-wise I feel like caves and brasseries were over represented... I wanted descriptions of grapevines for as one can see, the smells; dry, green, ripe, whatever!
Liv our contemporary heroine was also poorly fleshed out. Other than her biography which we learn in her first chapter we don't know anything about her career, her likes, dislikes, aspirations.
The plot 'twists' were rather obvious when they were finally revealed, and yet I did find myself getting a little weepy in the end, so Harmel is clearly doing something write...
I like time shift novels, I do, maybe just with more thrills thrown in.