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Review - The Sonnet Lover
Dec. 6th, 2008 01:48 pmI'm not really sure why I got this book out of the library. I picked it up randomly and flicked through it, since it was about sonnets and Shakespeare and I've been interested in that kind of thing lately thanks to my courses, and found myself reading it and then curious enough to take it out. The writing itself is reasonably absorbing -- it's in first person, which I didn't like all that much at first, but the descriptions are quite lovely and Carol Goodman does create quite a clear sense of location.
The plot itself is quite ridiculous. It's like The Da Vinci Code, only the danger feels a little ridiculous -- so much violence and murder over a series of poems? It doesn't feel realistic. The action is driven by a series of coincidences and the suspense is kept up mainly by the fact that the narrative is in first person and the narrator didn't want to see the truth. I didn't really get a strong sense of character from the book, at all. The strongest character was maybe that of Mara, a rather neurotic woman who was murdered -- and she was probably only distinctive because of her neuroses.
I did keep reading to find out the end, but all in all it felt like a ridiculously melodramatic book. It only gets two stars on goodreads ("it was okay") because I did like some of the description and the background story of William Shakespeare and Ginevra de Laura, and it did keep me occupied for a while instead of getting tossed swiftly.
The plot itself is quite ridiculous. It's like The Da Vinci Code, only the danger feels a little ridiculous -- so much violence and murder over a series of poems? It doesn't feel realistic. The action is driven by a series of coincidences and the suspense is kept up mainly by the fact that the narrative is in first person and the narrator didn't want to see the truth. I didn't really get a strong sense of character from the book, at all. The strongest character was maybe that of Mara, a rather neurotic woman who was murdered -- and she was probably only distinctive because of her neuroses.
I did keep reading to find out the end, but all in all it felt like a ridiculously melodramatic book. It only gets two stars on goodreads ("it was okay") because I did like some of the description and the background story of William Shakespeare and Ginevra de Laura, and it did keep me occupied for a while instead of getting tossed swiftly.
