-UNFINISHED-Don't like doing it but ... I gave up ... but I will be back!
Just didn't get involved
This was the second time I had attempted this book. Thought that maybe the first time I was a bit distracted and that stopped me from getting involved. But this time (after 150 pages of the near-700 pages) I just wasn't getting into it.
I don't particularly like the writing style. The present tense made it run like a race, never slowing down. Lots of detail. Lots of characters. Too much detail, too many characters (and so many with the same name!). The strange punctuation style kept pulling me up ... sometimes she would use quotation marks, sometimes not ... and this was within the same paragraph! And dialogue seemed to be inserted into a paragraph of monologue in an ad hoc way.
Maybe it was the excess of detail that kept me emotionally unattached. I guess I want my historical fiction to lean more on the fiction than the history?.
Winner of 2009 Man Booker
