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A review by reatschetter
The Long Way Home by Louise Penny
4.0
3 1/2 stars, maybe? I have loved every Inspector Gamache story, but this one was just disappointing. The first 2/3 of the book seemed to drag on and on; things only really picked up in the final 100 pages or so.
This appears to have been a deliberate choice on Penney's part. She mentions Heart of Darkness as an influence on this book, which I can certainly see (I hated Heart of Darkness, for the record, so perhaps that poisoned my view of this book). There's a lot of talk about rivers. Dark, brooding rivers. And sitting on benches. And quoting Gilead. (I also did not like Gilead. This book was just destined to fail me, wasn't it?) And there's a journey of sorts, although it took far too flippin' long to set out on it.
I think that I most missed the character development that usually shines in this series. They were just all so very flat.
Viewing this book as a one-off aberration and moving on to the next in the series...
2nd READING: Interestingly, on the second reading I like this one better and bumped it up a star. It still lags a bit from the others, but the slower pace worked this time. We are different people each time we read a book, and the person I am five years after my first review is older, wiser (I hope) and a little bit more understanding of what it looks like to live into our fears. I also didn't feel the characters were flat at all, they were simply growing DIFFERENTLY.
This appears to have been a deliberate choice on Penney's part. She mentions Heart of Darkness as an influence on this book, which I can certainly see (I hated Heart of Darkness, for the record, so perhaps that poisoned my view of this book). There's a lot of talk about rivers. Dark, brooding rivers. And sitting on benches. And quoting Gilead. (I also did not like Gilead. This book was just destined to fail me, wasn't it?) And there's a journey of sorts, although it took far too flippin' long to set out on it.
I think that I most missed the character development that usually shines in this series. They were just all so very flat.
Viewing this book as a one-off aberration and moving on to the next in the series...
2nd READING: Interestingly, on the second reading I like this one better and bumped it up a star. It still lags a bit from the others, but the slower pace worked this time. We are different people each time we read a book, and the person I am five years after my first review is older, wiser (I hope) and a little bit more understanding of what it looks like to live into our fears. I also didn't feel the characters were flat at all, they were simply growing DIFFERENTLY.