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Loading... The Venetian Mask: A Novelby Rosalind Laker
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will love Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. I had a really hard time getting through this book. It could not hold my interest. The plot was very slow moving. (  ) maryevans77 | Oct 4, 2009 |  When her mother dies, Marietta Fontana is taken into the Ospedale della Pieta, a Venetian music school for orphaned and abandoned girls. There she meets Elena Baccini, who becomes her best friend. Their destinies diverge, though, when they leave the Ospedale and are drawn into opposite sides of a deadly vendetta between two noble Venetian families. The plot certainly has dramatic potential, as does the vivid setting, but Laker's writing simply doesn't meet the test. Too much of the book is told and not shown; transitions from one point of view or scene to another are often awkward; and the style is overly formal and slightly stilted, particularly in the dialogue, which helps make the characters very two-dimensional. There was enough going on that I continued to read to find out what was going to happen, but I never felt intensely interested in the fates of the characters. Ultimately, the book felt to me too much like the mask of its title: a vivid, glittering surface, with very little beneath it. (  ) gwyneira | Jul 8, 2009 | This book was a bit slow-moving, so I read a couple of other books between chapters of this one. Despite the slow pace, I did really enjoy this book all the way through. I wouldn't mind trying more books by this author. (  ) ladybug74 | Mar 25, 2009 | I quite enjoyed this book for the most part, although my biggest complaint would be that it could've been perhaps half the length that it was. Some readers might find it slow-moving, but I did enjoy the attention to Venetian detail and it was an enligtening read as far as masking and Carnival were concerned. I enjoyed the storyline; however, the flow seemed a little abrupt nearer the end. After a fairly slower-moving pace for the majority of the novel, the ending seemed rushed & wrapped up a bit too neatly. It was predictable, but not in a totally expected way. This may have appealed to more readers had the first three-fourths of the novel been condensed and the last fourth expanded. ( )1  indygo88 | Oct 23, 2008 | Years ago I had read several books by Rosalind Laker and enjoyed them and several that I found boring and hard to get through. When I requested this as an ARC copy I thought it sounded familiar and wondered if it could possibly be a reissue of the book I had not enjoyed earlier. When I received it and started to read it, I discovered that yes, unfortunately it was the same book. I tried to read it again and found that I didn't like it any more now than I did when it first came out. ( )1 Electablue | Oct 7, 2008 |  no reviews | add a review
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(retrieved from Amazon Fri, 24 Apr 2009 07:58:19 -0400)
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