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Loading... Ex-Librisby Ross King
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will love Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. This wasn't a bad read all in all. There was a reasonable amount of action, suspense, and mystery, but the plot suffered due to the ending. The main themes covered here were books, the age of discovery, and the factional turbulence of the 17th century. If you enjoy books about books, and those set in this period, then you should enjoy this. The style of the writing was good, and didn't let the book down, I liked the way the author switched between the two chains of events that were going on in different times, as it helped to keep up the pace of the book. ( )I commend Ross King's rich vocabulary, dipping effortlessly into the arcane language of bookbinding, alchemy, shipbuilding and navigation; his command of Seventeenth Century history; his familiarity with the buildings and alleyways of London and Prague; his magical ability to conjure long-dead tastes, smells and sounds. But labouring through this book is like walking knee-deep in sucking mud. Every chapter swings from one plot to another metronomically, every character is a passive pawn of inexplicable circumstance, every plot thread is overburdened with pages of historical explanation. The ludicrous plot turns out to be a sham in the end, the heroine disappears from the narrative for most of the middle of the book, and the dread agents of evil in pursuit of the hero are swept away in the end by a deus ex machina just in the nick of time. The weak plot and unmotivated characters fail to support the dense architecture of historical fact built over them, and the entire story simply crumbles into waterlogged earth like Pontifex Hall in the final chapters. Murder, intruige, dastardly scoundrels and lots and lots of books. Slightly tedious writing style. It took for ever to get going. Usuallly, after 100 pages of being not very excited, I would have dumped it. But the background story was quite good and gave me an opportunity to read up on my sketchy knowledge of 17th century England and the onset of the Thirty Years War. The story as such could have used a little more tension - a fairly ordinary bookseller gets entangled in the search for a rare book, and lots of sinister characters are trying to find the same book for not apparent reasons. Ultimately the story was unsatisfactory and the ending outright silly. There they are, hero and heroine, running through a flooded house that is about to cave in, trying to escape the falling rubble, the flood and the bad guys trying to catch up with them. And all the while they are having this twisted, complicated conversation, were she is explaining to him, why he had to do what he did during the course of the book. Totally unbelievable. 0.089 seconds to build listing no reviews | add a review
Amazon.com Product Description (ISBN 0142000809, Paperback)A cryptic summons to a remote country house launches Isaac Inchbold, a London bookseller and antiquarian, on an odyssey through seventeenth-century Europe. Charged with the task of restoring a magnificent library destroyed by the war, Inchbold moves between Prague and the Tower Bridge in London, his fortunes-and his life-hanging on his ability to recover a missing manuscript. Yet the lost volume is not what it seems, and his search is part of a treacherous game of underworld spies and smugglers, ciphers, and forgeries. Inchbold's adventure is compelling from beginning to end as Ross King vividly recreates the turmoil of Europe in the seventeenth century-the sacks of great cities; Raleigh's final voyage; the quest for occult knowledge; and a watery escape from three mysterious horsemen.(retrieved from Amazon Fri, 24 Apr 2009 07:57:57 -0400) The first test round has been closed. Visit the Open Shelves Classification group for details. |
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