A review by hamilgrom
The Queen of the Night by Alexander Chee

4.0

I love reading long books on my vacations and choose this book to read during our honeymoon in Europe. The constant twists and turns and exotic settings made it an excellent read for this situation and I found myself telling my husband about each exciting plot point. That being said, there is a lot of plot to this book and it is fairly light on the character development side. For me, however, I was fine with that style. I was happy to get caught up in the gowns and misfortune and opera and didn't stop too much to wonder about character motivations or if everyone's actions were realistic and plausible. To me, this just wasn't that kind of book and I was fine to suspend my disbelief. Ultimately I'd say I really thoroughly enjoyed about 85% of this novel, the other 15% was just too convoluted for me to even make sense of. I highly recommend this for lovers of long novels you can sink your teeth into, lovers of soapy drama and lovers of rich historical fiction.