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Minusseven

  • 8
  • reviews
  • 2
  • helpful votes
  • 19
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Good Story, Middling Prose

Overall
3 out of 5 stars
Performance
4 out of 5 stars
Story
4 out of 5 stars

Reviewed: 07-17-24

I enjoyed this. The main characters were vivid, and their development was satisfying. i just wish the author would realize that people do not use each other's names every single time they speak. It really detracts from the naturalism of the dialogue. Also, the characters used (and sometimes misused) too many SAT words.

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intermittently entertaining

Overall
3 out of 5 stars
Performance
4 out of 5 stars
Story
3 out of 5 stars

Reviewed: 07-12-24

There's a lot of good stuff here, but the overall effect is inartful--the main character doesn't feel like a real person (and her husband even less so), there are too many long sections of dull backstory, and too many undigested chunks of history. I love history as much as I love fiction, but if you're going to combine the two, you shouldn't assume the reader knows less than you and wants to be lectured at. You should make it come alive through storytelling. Hilary Mantel set a very high bar, but it's worth aiming at.

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1 person found this helpful

Full of Anachronisms

Overall
3 out of 5 stars
Performance
4 out of 5 stars
Story
4 out of 5 stars

Reviewed: 04-07-24

This book had major strengths and major weaknesses. The story was compelling enough and although the climactic confrontation and its aftermath were unlikely, I found them satisfying. The depictions of childbirth and women's health were also compelling. But the dialogue and the central relationship were utterly, distractingly anachronistic. It feels like the main couple wandered in from Outlander, where at least there's the excuse that the protagonist is a time traveler.

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1 person found this helpful

An Extraordinary Book

Overall
5 out of 5 stars
Performance
5 out of 5 stars
Story
5 out of 5 stars

Reviewed: 09-02-22

This was a challenging listen (more graphic descriptions of sex acts than I would seek out otherwise) but so well worth it. If you are a woman or care at all about women there is much food for thought. Granted it's probably especially relevant for white women/people since those were the only ones willing to engage with the author longterm, but I am a white woman and I got a lot out of it.

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Weak prose

Overall
1 out of 5 stars
Performance
3 out of 5 stars
Story
1 out of 5 stars

Reviewed: 01-07-22

I could not get past the first couple of chapters. If you are well grounded in pre-20th century English literature you will find this author's prose jarring. She seems to have set the book in some kind of steampunk alternative past in order to excuse anachronism and lack of research. Not at all what I expected from other reviews.

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shaky prose, great story

Overall
4 out of 5 stars
Performance
4 out of 5 stars
Story
4 out of 5 stars

Reviewed: 08-04-21

A good, taut, entertaining story. I did feel let down when the author used the narrative equivalent of a fast forward button right when things were at their most exciting (not moving forward in the main story, but dumping almost all the remaining secrets into one big flashback).

I found it forgivable since she's a good storyteller, but this author's command of language and idiom is not great. She used "inimitable" three times and I don't think she knows what it actually means.

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too predictable

Overall
3 out of 5 stars
Performance
3 out of 5 stars
Story
3 out of 5 stars

Reviewed: 05-23-21

The narration was fine. The book was sparse with its scene setting and characterization, so the story bears most of the weight. But, without spoiling it, the number and arrangement of characters was such that the central mystery was far too obvious, far too early, and knowing something the protagonist didn't know wasn't all that satisfying--I would rather have had him find out sooner and have more of the plot unfold under that circumstance.

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Please, Find a French Speaker

Overall
4 out of 5 stars
Performance
3 out of 5 stars
Story
5 out of 5 stars

Reviewed: 04-29-20

I enjoyed the story a lot, I'd rank it high among Hilderbrand's work. And the narrator has a good, lively way with dialogue, although she sometimes sounds like her nose is stuffed up. BUT this is a book with a lot of French words in it, and the narrator clearly has never studied French and doesn't understand French pronunciation. For someone with even a basic grasp of the language, it is agonizing to hear her mangle words she doesn't know. A flat, Anglicized pronunciation would have been far better than the gutteral, made-up "French" pronunciations here (or the narrator could have gone over the entire book with a French tutor to prepare for her performance, maybe), but bottom line, it was a bad call to assign this particular narrator to this particular book.

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