People of the Book: A Novel by Geraldine Brooks Summary and Reviews
|
List Price: Our Price: $11.80 You Save: $14.15 (55%) Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days Buy Used: from $8.42 (click here) Category: Book See more book details and other editions |
|---|
Book Reviews of People of the Book: A Novel
Book Review: Losing its way
Summary: 3 Stars
The reason I gave this book a three is because parts of it deserved a two, parts deserved a four. Three sounds quite average but this book definitely isn't.
An enjoyable read, but there were quite a few patches where the story seemed to drift and got a bit boring. However, on the whole, I liked it, I don't feel my time was wasted reading it, and I'm recommending it to a friend.
My favourite bits were the tying up of the loose ends. There was no happy ending for everyone, and although it can be unsatisfying when a relationship doesn't have a definite ending, it was realistic. So much so, it made me wonder what sort of relationship the author had with her own mother !
Nowhere near as good as "Year of Wonders" but perhaps the story of something that happened in Britain just interested me more - I certainly couldn't fault the writing style, just the tempo of the plot.
Book Review: Worthy
Summary: 1 Stars
I gave up on this one. The structure is simplistic- you get a not very distinctive Aussie chick who digs a whole lot of gunk out of a rare book- a butterfly wing.. a hair. Then you get a chapter of historical narrative where you find out where the particular gunk came from. The author has that irritating habit of slipping in ethnic words for objects to sound authentic- why can't these people just make coffee in a coffee pot?- why do they have to make it in something looking like the worst hand in scrabble? I couldn't find any of the characters had distinctive voices- they all blended into one mushy whole. Anything factual sounds like it's been dug out of a page of Wikipedia. I so didn't care. Book Review: Unusual format, made it all the better
Summary: 3 Stars
A fictionalised account of the unveiling of the Sarajevo Haggadah (sp?). This could have been a boring, faux-academic mess and it just isn't. The characters are complex, and unlike some books there aren't really any villains. Although various characters end up doing wrong, all of them have morally-sound reasons for what they do. The 'back in time' sections - moving progressively backwards through the centuries until they get to the point when it was written. Why only 3 stars? No real reason - there isn't anything wrong with this book, it's just that it doesn't quite merit an 80% score. If Amazon had a 3 1/2 stars rating, it would be perfect.Book Review: Easy to read,but not compelling.
Summary: 3 Stars
Geraldine Brooks has an easy,fluent,writing style which can be quite compelling at times,but I confess I did not find this book compelling in itself.
Here,she has created a fictional history of a real book and intercut that with a contempory story of a female Australian book preserver.Curiously, despite the fact that Ms Brooks is Australian I found these sections the least convincing and generally quite dull and cliched.Conversely, I found parts of the historical chapters relatively gripping and her writing really did seem to come to life at these times.
However,overall too much of it is cliched and rather trite.I found a lot of it far too obvious and too many characters seemed to be little more than stereotypes on which to hang her analogy.
Although I quite enjoyed reading it when I was reading it, I never found myself drawn back to the book and towards the end I began to find it something of a trial to actually pick it up.
Book Review: Stories within a story
Summary: 4 Stars
The back cover of this book does not adequately describe, or explain, the intricately woven story inside; I am sure that to many the tale of a rare book expert,asked to conserve a 600 year old book would be deemed slightly boring. This book is anything but that. Each chapter cleverly locks together the history of the book, by concentrating on one time period during its history. Each chapter is then a story within a story and this method meant that although several time periods are covered, I was never lost or confused by where we were in time or place, instead the characters and time periods were very subtly linked by the briefest mention of whatever clue to the books history that chapter focused on.
The majority of the book focuses on Hanna, the expert conserver, and not only her findings but her changing relationship with her mother as she herself discovers secrets from her own past. Unlike many who have reviewed this book, I actually found these chapters the most difficult, they were written in a very different style to those set in the past, one which I found did not hold my attention as well. The first chapter, which places us in Bosnia in 1996, seemed very technical and was mainly centered on giving us a picture of Hanna as someone very focused and dedicated to her work by telling us of the level of research she had gone into to understand the conservation of books. However, I found this chapter slightly confusing and after reading the second, felt that the two should have been placed in the opposite order, with the Haggadah being introduced before its conserver.
I felt that the books ending departed again from the expected, and left me feeling slightly like I had missed out on, or misunderstood something vital that clarified the last few chapters and linked them to the history of the Haggadah and those who made it, the ending I felt was deserved. Instead, it seemed we were given the compulsory happy romantic ending, but one which, in itself, created a new stage in the history of the Haggadah.