by M.J. Rose
Official Site | Facebook | Twitter | Goodreads
Format: ARC, ebook
Published: May 7th, 2013 by Atria Books
Genre: Fiction, Historical/ Suspense
Kindle | Amazon | Book Depository
In 1843, novelist Victor Hugo’s beloved nineteen-year-old daughter drowned. Ten years later, Hugo began participating in hundreds of séances to reestablish contact with her. In the process, he claimed to have communed with the likes of Plato, Galileo, Shakespeare, Dante, Jesus—and even the Devil himself. Hugo’s transcriptions of these conversations have all been published. Or so it was believed.
Recovering from her own losses, mythologist Jac L’Etoile arrives on the Isle of Jersey—where Hugo conducted the séances—hoping to uncover a secret about the island’s Celtic roots. But the man who’s invited her there, a troubled soul named Theo Gaspard, has hopes she’ll help him discover something quite different—Hugo’s lost conversations with someone called the Shadow of the Sepulcher. -Goodreads
Review:
"We are all fragile. Tragedy can strike in an instant. Almost nothing is within our control." (loc.270)
A novel of past lives, love, loss, history and understanding; a novel of sinister seduction. I'd probably give this book more of a 3.5 rating. I don't feel like the book lived up to it's claim as a suspense novel, although I love it as a part historical fiction. I absolutely love the author's writing style and ability to transport us in time with it, but I feel like the plot was lacking substance in value. At the end of the book I was left disappointed because, considering everything that happened in the book, nothing really happened at all. I suppose the purpose of this book was to get Jac to change, and perhaps provide an ending to this series, but that's really all I took in.
"Jac knew she hadn't yet confronted all her shadows. And that one day she'd need to." (loc.246)
It took me a while to get through this book, not because it was hard to get through, but more like it didn't grasp my interest long enough for me to want to keep reading more than one chapter at a time. There wasn't much pulling me through the book, but I must say I was greatly interested more with the Victor Hugo accounts of events than the present and B.C. tense. I enjoyed his aspects very much as he struggled to overcome the grief of losing his daughter, Didine, and finding life's purpose in Fantine. I understand how the entire situation with The Seduction (the devil's allure in times of grief) turned Jac's life around and changed her for the better, but after the final throes every once else in the story just dissipated with a flip of the hand, as if they never had any real importance in the book at all. In the end, this story is meant to symbolize people dealing with their demons and how they struggle to overcome them.
First Line: "Every story begins with a tremble of anticipation." (loc.46)
Last Line: "At the starting point we may have an idea of our point of arrival, but what lies before us and makes us shudder is the journey, for that is all discovery." (loc.4716)
------
Galley provided by NetGalley via Atria Books (an imprint of Simon & Schuster)
*Quotes are from uncorrected advanced galleys and may change before going to press. Please refer to the final printed book for official quotes.
No comments:
Post a Comment