Absorbing adventure story - Rated 
In short this is an adventure story, following three main characters, the period and country that the story is set in is recognisable and yet different. I found this aspect appealing and enjoyed following the characters on their adventures. For me the book started a little slowly and felt overly detailed but then I started to enjoy the detail, and found the world in which the adventures are set very absorbing. The story teases you throughout, as you realise you are over halfway though and still don't really have clue what is going on. It was very different to anything else I have read and made a pleasant change. I look forward to the sequel.
Strange but seductive - Rated
Pastiche or just mindless wanderings? Creative brilliance or rehashed rubbish? This book changes my mind from chapter to chapter but yet has curiously kept me keen to learn more. The characters deepen and strengthen through the book, in particular as Chang rediscovers his own humanity. The plot is also complex but leaves enough clues not to utterly frustrate.
A previous reviewer's comparison to Jonathan Norrell and Mr Strange was spot on. The book is highly unusual, sometimes annoying but overall offers the reader something different when so many other books do not.
An entertaining adventure - Rated
I greatly enjoyed reading this - I found most of it to be fast-paced and entertaining, and on the whole certainly not boring. The three main protagonists, Miss Temple, Cardinal Chang, and Doctor Svenson are well-rounded characters, all flawed in their individual ways, and when they get thrown together as initially reluctant heroes to defeat the sinister 'Cabal', it's interesting to see the personality changes Miss Temple and Doctor Svenson go through. Many of the other characters are admittedly either two-dimensional or just plain annoying, and I agree with other reviewers that the book would have benefited from editing in places, but overall I think it's a really enjoyable adventure, and I'd definitely like to read the second volume when it's published.
Well I enjoyed it - Rated 
I have no idea of the literary merits of this book. However, despite the length, I just had to carry on reading to find out what happened (3am on a work day!)
The ripping good yarn was quite unsophisticated, almost childish; and it didn't matter that some of the adventures, the escapes or the incompetence of the baddies, were unlikely. I could not put it down. Meanwhile, the antics some of the characters got up to were positively adult!
I would recommend this book.
This is a fully imagined world filled with fully developed characters - Rated
Each described so well visually and through their actions and relations with the people around them that you have no problem immersing yourself completely into the created world and its events. I came away from this book with a real visual imprint--colors, textures, faces, costumes, the landscape--but also a sense of willfulness :)
Each member of the hero triumverate is so able to think wildly on his/her feet and to care deeply and without shame about what he/she cares about that you really SEE the difference between those who never have to struggle for the things they want because they already have them, those who are willing to simply experience everything through the blue glow of their television screen, hoping only for a more throughly sensual experience somewhere down the technological road, and those who, in struggling, come to such a different point in their lives and such an internal revolution, that the other two options of passive experience are left utterly meaningless. Everything about the book says Don't Give Up. It's immensely creative--though, if I could have changed anything, it would have been the amount of blood at the end. would also recommend reading Tino Georgiou's masterpiece--The Fates--if you haven't read it yet.
|
