![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Ghostwalk
, by Rebecca Stott
This wasn't a book for me. That doesn't mean it was a bad book -- it just wasn't for me.
Shortly after her mentor Elizabeth dies by drowning, Lydia is asked by her mentor's son -- the man with whom she, not coincidentally, carried on an affair some years before -- to complete Elizabeth's magnum opus, a book about Newton's involvement with alchemy and with secretive alchemical circles. However, it rapidly becomes clear that Elizabeth's death was not an accident, but a murder, and furthermore a murder that ties into a three-hundred-year-old conspiracy.
The problem I had was twofold. One: I apparently lack the gene or acculturation or whatever that makes men who are smarmy, arrogant, lying jerks seem attractive. Lydia's lover -- Elizabeth's son -- is kind of... a jackass, and it's clear that I'm supposed to feel sympathetic to Lydia (and other female characters) for being so magnetically drawn to him, but I'm... not particularly. I mean, I feel bad for them that he lied to them and treated them badly, but then they kept going back and then acting surprised when he, you know, continued to lie to them and manipulate them for his own purposes, and I rapidly lost patience. C'mon! He's always been lying to everyone, including you! Why does this continue to be a surprise? I realize that a lot of people do find that attractive, but it didn't work for me, and in addition to meaning that I disliked the man himself (a fairly major character), it also gradually eroded my fondness for the female characters who kept coming back to be condescended to and jerked around.
Two: Some time ago, when reviewing a YA book about a roller derby girl (I think),![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
buymeaclue coined the phrase "Too much boyfriend, not enough roller derby." In this book, it was "Too much midlife crisis, not enough alchemy." I find history, the politics of historians, and the history of science and alchemy in early modern Europe really interesting! I kept feeling like I was wading through a lot of upper-middle-class moaning about Life to get to it. Again, not something that I would consider a universal bad, just... not for me.
The alchemy stuff was interesting (it's something I studied myself, once upon a time), and I don't have too many complaints about that. I mean, I think the author overdramatized some stuff (yes, early scientists spent a lot of time on alchemy, because they considered it a valid science, but that doesn't mean that they were all nuts, just that they were misinformed about some chemistry; yes, early scientists/alchemists were very secretive, but -- well, so are a lot of modern research scientists), but overdramatizing stuff for the sake of the story is fine. It felt a bit as though she was trying to rejigger an already-interesting idea to be a bit more da Vinci Code, though, which didn't help my perceptions all that much. But... yeah, if the story had been centered the history, I would have been fine. It just wasn't.
Anyway. Not a bad book, just not a book for me, because the characters were all wrong to get my sympathy and without sympathizing with the characters I don't get very far. (I probably would have put it back down fairly early on, in fact, if it weren't that it was my book club book for March.)
Running Tally:
Total Books: 20
Fiction: 7
Non-Fiction: 13
POC Author: 6
, by Rebecca StottThis wasn't a book for me. That doesn't mean it was a bad book -- it just wasn't for me.
Shortly after her mentor Elizabeth dies by drowning, Lydia is asked by her mentor's son -- the man with whom she, not coincidentally, carried on an affair some years before -- to complete Elizabeth's magnum opus, a book about Newton's involvement with alchemy and with secretive alchemical circles. However, it rapidly becomes clear that Elizabeth's death was not an accident, but a murder, and furthermore a murder that ties into a three-hundred-year-old conspiracy.
The problem I had was twofold. One: I apparently lack the gene or acculturation or whatever that makes men who are smarmy, arrogant, lying jerks seem attractive. Lydia's lover -- Elizabeth's son -- is kind of... a jackass, and it's clear that I'm supposed to feel sympathetic to Lydia (and other female characters) for being so magnetically drawn to him, but I'm... not particularly. I mean, I feel bad for them that he lied to them and treated them badly, but then they kept going back and then acting surprised when he, you know, continued to lie to them and manipulate them for his own purposes, and I rapidly lost patience. C'mon! He's always been lying to everyone, including you! Why does this continue to be a surprise? I realize that a lot of people do find that attractive, but it didn't work for me, and in addition to meaning that I disliked the man himself (a fairly major character), it also gradually eroded my fondness for the female characters who kept coming back to be condescended to and jerked around.
Two: Some time ago, when reviewing a YA book about a roller derby girl (I think),
buymeaclue coined the phrase "Too much boyfriend, not enough roller derby." In this book, it was "Too much midlife crisis, not enough alchemy." I find history, the politics of historians, and the history of science and alchemy in early modern Europe really interesting! I kept feeling like I was wading through a lot of upper-middle-class moaning about Life to get to it. Again, not something that I would consider a universal bad, just... not for me.The alchemy stuff was interesting (it's something I studied myself, once upon a time), and I don't have too many complaints about that. I mean, I think the author overdramatized some stuff (yes, early scientists spent a lot of time on alchemy, because they considered it a valid science, but that doesn't mean that they were all nuts, just that they were misinformed about some chemistry; yes, early scientists/alchemists were very secretive, but -- well, so are a lot of modern research scientists), but overdramatizing stuff for the sake of the story is fine. It felt a bit as though she was trying to rejigger an already-interesting idea to be a bit more da Vinci Code, though, which didn't help my perceptions all that much. But... yeah, if the story had been centered the history, I would have been fine. It just wasn't.
Anyway. Not a bad book, just not a book for me, because the characters were all wrong to get my sympathy and without sympathizing with the characters I don't get very far. (I probably would have put it back down fairly early on, in fact, if it weren't that it was my book club book for March.)
Running Tally:
Total Books: 20
Fiction: 7
Non-Fiction: 13
POC Author: 6
