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5 out of 5 stars
By
opinion
on
07-18-16
A good read..as they say
Heart breaking book. I read it and it made me grateful for my own home and a snippet of understanding of the ache to be able to live in your country of choice with people you can trust. How fragile we are, and attitudes change by the day.
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4 of 4 people found this review helpful
3 out of 5 stars
By
Wras
on
05-06-16
The horror the horror
I know that for me this book did not work, it has many good attributes but it never managed to engage me with the main character or the message proposed by the book. Fidelma the main character is such a contradiction and so unintelligent sometimes it hurts. The village where the story starts is not real in all its minutiae, the locals discuss the Aenids And Didos dilema or spend time plying A Midsummer Night's Dream. This are not the normal endeavors of working people.
Fidelma applies for a job and finishes the application with a quote by Lord Byron, her african boss likes this and gives her the job as an office cleaner.
Every emigrant character in the story talks of the horrors they have faced openly and with an introspection that is hard to believe; in my experience people that are traumatised by violence and suffering find it very hard to expose or even come to terms with those feeling much less expose them to strangers. They also speak in broken english but with vocabularies that are far beyond a recently acquired second language. All this inequities come across as pretentious and artificial, breaking the reality the writer can create.
It is no secret that the story is about the atrocities in Bosnia, Dr Vlad is well described and a very interesting character but he is not on the book enough to be eloquent about his crimes, he for the most part denies them, but stains fidelma with their encounter and she absorbs a kind of moral responsibility that is just not believable.
The potential in this book was great and it is achieved in some moments with ease with some moving and beautiful passages but they are almost too disparate to create a single body or continuity of plot.
The reader is excellent and deals with the many voices with ease.
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10 of 16 people found this review helpful