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A review by kirkw1972
The Book of Mirrors by E.O. Chirovici
2.0
I nearly gave this book up a quarter of the way through but seeing as the majority of Goodreads reviews were 4 or 5 stars I decided to keep trying and finish it. I really wished I'd given up. As with a lot of the books I review I received a free ARC from netgalley for an honest review. When you send to kindle every now and again the formatting goes wonky and sentences and paragraphs will have breaks in odd places. This however seemed to have had no proof reading done to it whatsoever. Around 90% of the capital letters were missing which made an already un-enjoyable book that much harder.
One of the other issues was language. The author is Romanian and this is his first English language novel. And for me it really showed. The book is split into three parts, each moving the story on from the point of view of Katz the agent, a journalist and a retired policeman who worked the original murder. They are all written in first person and all have the same tone and pitch; the result being each character blended into one and I found it quite easy to forget who I was reading about. On top of the lack of capital letters this book became really unreadable.
The sad thing is the actual premise is a good one. Richard Flynn sends a book proposal to a literary agent which could lead to the solving of a 30 year old murder. This sets the above three mentioned characters on a mission to eventually find out whodunnit. The twist wasn't bad and as someone who has a keen interest in mental health issues I found the parts around retrograde amnesia really interesting.
Overall I think a lot more could have been done with this book and even just sorting out the language and grammar would have moved it up another star. A real shame
One of the other issues was language. The author is Romanian and this is his first English language novel. And for me it really showed. The book is split into three parts, each moving the story on from the point of view of Katz the agent, a journalist and a retired policeman who worked the original murder. They are all written in first person and all have the same tone and pitch; the result being each character blended into one and I found it quite easy to forget who I was reading about. On top of the lack of capital letters this book became really unreadable.
The sad thing is the actual premise is a good one. Richard Flynn sends a book proposal to a literary agent which could lead to the solving of a 30 year old murder. This sets the above three mentioned characters on a mission to eventually find out whodunnit. The twist wasn't bad and as someone who has a keen interest in mental health issues I found the parts around retrograde amnesia really interesting.
Overall I think a lot more could have been done with this book and even just sorting out the language and grammar would have moved it up another star. A real shame