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nday 's review for:
ילדי החירות
by פאולינה סיימונס, Paullina Simons
I think the best thing this book had going for it was that it was extremely easy to read.
Now, it’s been years since I read the first two books in the Bronze Horseman trilogy, so I’ll be really honest in that I could remember absolutely nothing about the parents from those books, and I probably missed some of the “snippets” that tied back to the original trilogy that might have made this book better.
I felt that the book was lacking a plot – it felt like the author had had the material to write a short story, and then had to make a novel out of it and used filler to reach the page requirement. And the filler seemed to be the authors “interesting” bits of research, which she at times awkwardly tried to work in around her characters. It was like “oh, here’s some stuff I found out about, let me loosely tie this into my characters somehow so I can fill a few pages.” I don’t mind that sort of thing so much when it’s more relevant to the characters, their story or development. But it just didn’t seem to be in this case.
The other part of the filler was taking so much time with the story when Gina was so young. It really felt that beyond the initial meeting and establishment of the character's feelings, not a lot happened in the first half of the book. The settling of the Attaviano's in the country actually had good potential to be interesting, but then really fell flat.
The second half of the book felt more like it had somewhere to go, with Gina being older, and Harry's life coming to a crossroads, but the momentum that I felt could have been built once again just fell a little flat. Harry was a weak "hero" and his lack of character and depth hindered the book. Gina was a great heroine, she was strong, feisty and interesting. But as soon as she got around Harry she just lost so much of herself in what she thought she should be for him.
There were some great opportunities for the author to development some side relationships and a greater depth of emotional conflict, with Harry's lady and Gina's brother meeting, Ben and Harry's sister. It felt like there were stories to be told there, but it all just got left and nothing happened. What frustrates me is this book had honest to goodness potential, and it was all left hanging unrealised.
One of the biggest things that bugged me about this book was the change in writing perspective. A majority of the book was written in third person from a character’s perspective, primarily Gina or Harry. But for some reason when the author got to a particularly emotional scene she switched to a more omniscient third person perspective, where it was told from neither of the characters point of view and suddenly you were completely distanced from the characters and their emotions, and what could have been a good, impactful emotional scene suddenly lost it’s emotionality. It was quite annoying.
The ending just did not hit the spot for me, but I did feel that it ran true to Harry's character - weak and ineffectual. I know because you get to hear their story in the Bronze Horseman trilogy, that there was still a lot of their story left untold, which was fine. But it also felt like things were still left in the middle of a mess and there wasn't actually any kind of resolution, and the author could have tied things up a little more conclusively to make the story more complete by itself.
So, overall, I felt the book was easy reading, but poorly written and with little in the way of plot. For anyone that wants something that won’t require any thinking that is interesting enough, then this is the book for you.