It seems as though everyone has lapsed in their attention to the blog. Have you all finished the book? Are you bored with the blog already? To add a bit of life to our recently deflated discussions, I have decided to play Devil's advocate.
I'll say right off, I didn't really like the book. Reasons are as follows:
1) without the prologue, there would have been no tension. The prologue served as a hook to provide tension throughout. This, in my mind, is a lousy writing tool. The author, instead, should have used her writing skill to provide tension throughout the book....
2) sure, there was a story, but, other than that, there wasn't much to the book. There was poor use of vocabulary, the author has a limp writing style, and there was virtually no character arc for the protagonist. Alessandra's character didn't evolve. An age old saying in writing is, "show, don't tell." We are told that Alessandra changed upon having her child, however this was not demonstrated. It would have been better to see the changes in her -- getting up in the middle of the night but not getting angry with her baby, letting events blow off instead of getting emotional. Frankly, the painter had more character evolution than the protangonist.
3) poor syntax. At times it seemed as though the author's second language was English. I read the last couple of appendicies and thought that, instead, the author has just been speaking Italian too long to write well in English. Example: sometimes the author will construct sentences such as, "I didn't want to tie the ribbon around my waist yet." Most English novels written by native English speakers will write the sentence as, "I didn't yet want to tie the ribbon around my waist." There were places were the sentence structure seemed awkward and, for me, this detracted from the quality of the novel.
4) I felt the serial killer thing was yet another limp ploy to involk tension. To what purpose did the author introduce the maimings? To put doubt in Alessandra's mind about the painter's motives and personality. That's it, that's all. To a lesser extent, you may say that the serial killer added another reason for Alessandra to be fearful of the city at night. Frankly, when you're already afraid of the unknown, what's a serial killer on top of it all? The serial killer was a lame attempt at making the book more mainstream and marketable.
I will say this for the book, for all the reasons pointed out by Puddleglum, it has some subtleties that are worth a read. However, I think that those subtletlies are inherent in the period which the author writes. It would be hard to write a novel about Renaissance Florence without those points Puddleglum and I state, ie., Christianity/Classicalism, husband/wife, male/female, etc. There is also some lovely perspective about how Alessandra views art because she, herself, is an aspiring painter.
Overall, the book left me wanting. It didn't seem to live up to its potential. Alessandra's character could have been fleshed out more. The writer could have improved her style to make it a gripping novel of character and municipal evolution instead of relying upon cheap tricks to provide tension.
Come on, all of you. Debate me! Let's do some blogging.
