Scan barcode
A review by rosseroo
Creation by Katherine Govier
1.0
Over the 17-year course of the bookclub I'm in, there have been many times where we've picked a book I have zero interest in, only to find myself very pleasantly surprised. This was not one of those times. Like many others in the group, I made it about 1/3 of the way through this before admitting that the combination of characters, setting, themes, and pace, just weren't my cup of tea.
The idea isn't terrible: take a missing chapter from the life of famed painter and naturalist John James Audubon as he's in the midst of producing his masterpiece "Birds of North America" and fictionalize it. Although following his passage up the Canadian coast of Labrador should have been interesting, on the page it's a tepid slog. The mechanics and details of his process, and the subscription model for his massive work, are kind of interesting -- but not enough to make up for page after page of navel-gazing, a chaste romantic subplot of sorts, and a stiff friendship with another person seeking to exhaustively catalog the natural environs. I guess some readers might find the story and prose magical, but I sure didn't.
The idea isn't terrible: take a missing chapter from the life of famed painter and naturalist John James Audubon as he's in the midst of producing his masterpiece "Birds of North America" and fictionalize it. Although following his passage up the Canadian coast of Labrador should have been interesting, on the page it's a tepid slog. The mechanics and details of his process, and the subscription model for his massive work, are kind of interesting -- but not enough to make up for page after page of navel-gazing, a chaste romantic subplot of sorts, and a stiff friendship with another person seeking to exhaustively catalog the natural environs. I guess some readers might find the story and prose magical, but I sure didn't.