Tag: Historical Fiction Books Review

It is 1939. Nazi Germany. The country is holding its breath. Death has never been busier, and will be busier still. By her brother’s graveside, Liesel’s life is changed when she picks up a single object, partially hidden in the snow. It is The Gravedigger’s Handbook, left behind there by accident, and it is her first act of book thievery. So begins a love affair with books and words, as Liesel, with the help of her accordian-playing foster father, learns to read. Soon she is stealing books from Nazi book-burnings, the mayor’s wife’s library, wherever there are books to be found.

To be very honest here I had a lot of expectations for this book, because I’ve heard a lot of good about it. After reading this book, or I should say trying to read this book I just don’t understand the hype with this book because in my opinion this book isn’t as good as people claim it to be.

The plot is about Nazi Germany and I tend to love books set in that time period but this book is bad. Because the more you read the more boring and uninteresting this book becomes.

The narrator of this book is Death itself. Which might work for some books but it didn’t work fir this book. Having a narrator doesn’t work for this book because the entire book we follow the same character and we see everything from the main characters perspective. So you don’t think about the narrator telling the story unless the narrator makes a comment outside the main story which makes you remember that there is a narrator in this book which isn’t the main character. 

At the same time the narrator use very nonsensical language. Which really bugged me a lot because it would just paused me for a short time every once and a while.

The beginning of this book was actually interesting but the further you get into this book the more and more boring and uninteresting it becomes.

Its important to say that I DNF-ed this book after having read like 52% of this book. Because reading this book was a torture to me since it irritated me and bored me so much that I just couldn’t handle to finish this book. But at the same time I’m not a fan of historical fiction books especially if they are about nazi Germany and the holocaust because its a very dark time in human history.

This book was very anti-climatic because the narrator would tell us what would happen next before it actually happened. And I really hate it whenever this happen because I don’t like someone telling me what will happen next in a book / show / movie before I see it for myself.

During my time reading this book I started to think that the author was more interesting about marketing this book rather than actually giving us a good book.

The writing style of this book because it was 100% telling-without-showing anything to us. Which I find every single time to be very boring and so off-putting. But the same time the writing style in this book is very weak, and it was like the author didnt even care about giving us a good book but rather cared about the paycheck he would get after finishing and publishing this book.

Don’t get me wrong, I wanted to like this book so much because it had a very good premise but after trying to read it, I dislike it so much. 

One of the many reasons why I dislike this book as much as I do is that it is very repetitive. The book uses the same phrases, events etc all the time in this book and it like the author doesn’t know when enough is enough with being repetitive.

The characters in this book are so all over the place. The main character is a young girl, and really I don’t know what to think about here. Since at times she makes hard decisions like an adult but other times she just makes the stupidest decisions ever. The adoptive mother of the main character is a mean asshole for no reason to the little girl. And the adoptive father of the main character is a people pleaser, he just cant say no to his adoptive daughter nor to his wife so he ends up being the d-bag when the mother says something else.

I Give This Book 1 / 5

Seventeen-year-old Audrey Rose Wadsworth was born a lord’s daughter, with a life of wealth and privilege stretched out before her. But between the social teas and silk dress fittings, she leads a forbidden secret life. Against her stern father’s wishes and society’s expectations, Audrey often slips away to her uncle’s laboratory to study the gruesome practice of forensic medicine. When her work on a string of savagely killed corpses drags Audrey into the investigation of a serial murderer, her search for answers brings her close to her own sheltered world.

I gotta say that I didn’t know much about this book before reading this book and because of this I didn’t have any expectations for this book. Which I think was a good think when it came down to this book.

This book is played as the book about a girl who searches to find the identity of who Jack the Ripper was. But the investigation in this book is actually not the main topic of this book but rather the main character which is a 17 year old girl in the 1888 spends 50% of this book talking about how shitty it was to be a female in the 1888. I get it, it must have been shitty but still the reason why I picked up this book is to read about the investigation of who Jack the Ripper was not a commentary of 1888 England.

The beginning of this book was actually interesting but the deeper you can into this book the more down hill it began going. The beginning was very intriguing, interesting and enjoyable but it very quickly become boring and uninteresting.

From solely the beginning of this book I was ready to give this book a 5 star review but the further I got into this book the more tired of this book I got. Because there were a lot of moments where I was ready to DNF this book while reading this book. But in the end I read the whole book even thou I should have DNF-ed this book.

This book is a historical fiction book but the moment you start reading this book you can see that this book is heavily targeting young adults and teenagers. In the sense of how it is written, the plot and the characters.

The characters in this book are very weak, they aren’t the greatest. Each of the character in this book have barely a character, each of the character feel in the same character which some rare moments where their personalities begin to shine a little bit. 

I’m writing this review the next day after finishing this book and already now I can tell you that I don’t remember so well the character and I cant tell you much about them. I remember that the father and the uncle of the main character have beef with each other. The main character is very very emotional. The brother of the main character brushes his hair every 5 minutes. The guy the main character falls in love with is like the modern-day high school jock who tries to pretend that he is Sherlock Holmes. And the rest of the characters in this book I just completely forgot.

The plot here is very weak. The plot summary of the book on the back of this book tells us that it is a jack the ripper investigation but the majority of this book isn’t about the jack the ripper investigation. 

The writing style of this book, is very heavily targeting young adult and teenagers readers. Its very simple and easy so that teenagers would have fun with this book. The writing style wasn’t greatest to put it very simple way.

I Give This Book 2 / 5

The Vignes twin sisters will always be identical. But after growing up together in a small, southern black community and running away at age sixteen, it’s not just the shape of their daily lives that is different as adults, it’s everything: their families, their communities, their racial identities. Many years later, one sister lives with her black daughter in the same southern town she once tried to escape. The other passes for white, and her white husband knows nothing of her past. Still, even separated by so many miles and just as many lies, the fates of the twins remain intertwined. What will happen to the next generation, when their own daughters’ storylines intersect?

I had some high expectations because once again I fell on the highly positive comments people on Goodreads have about this book. And let me tell you that this book doesn’t live up to all these good comments people have about this book. And I quickly DNF-ed it maybe like 10 chapters into this book

The writing style in this book is very very poor, it didn’t feel like it was written by a person who have written multiple books. It feel more like it was written by a elementary school child.

The plot here is very very boring, we fall twin sisters who essentially grow apart, they live in different cities, have their own lives and no contact with each other. And the entire plot is that one twin sister wants to rebuild the relationship with her twin but the second twin doesn’t want to. And to be honest it feels more like a family melodrama than anything else. And I don’t like that category to put it a nice and easy way.

The entire plot was very very drawn out, too long then it needed to be, uninteresting and very boring. The plot itself was the definition of torture and how you shouldn’t write a book

When it comes to the characters in this book they are bad, they are very shallow, flat and very very annoying. And I had very hard time even trying to like them, or finding something about them which would make me interested in them.

I didn’t read any of the other books of this author but after trying to read this book, I dont will read anything more from this author because this book have discouraged me from doing it.

I Give This Book 1 / 5

A Tale of Two Cities is Charles Dickens’s great historical novel, set against the violent upheaval of the French Revolution. The most famous and perhaps the most popular of his works, it compresses an event of immense complexity to the scale of a family history, with a cast of characters that includes a bloodthirsty ogress and an antihero as believably flawed as any in modern fiction. Though the least typical of the author’s novels, A Tale of Two Cities still underscores many of his enduring themes—imprisonment, injustice, social anarchy, resurrection, and the renunciation that fosters renewal.

i actually didn’t have any expectations for this book and it turns out that it was far better than I had though about it would be. Its important to say that I didn’t know anything about this book before getting into it. 

This book is a very heavy reading because it doesn’t have any humour, and it talks about storming of the Bastille around 50 years after it happened. This book also contains a lot of very violent ogress. 

The characters here were actually very good, even thou I didn’t love them, I still liked them a lot to care about them. 

Some characters in this book were better than others. And by this I mean that some characters were shallow and flat and straight forward uninteresting. But some of the other characters were very interesting and I liked them a lot. 

This book is a roller coaster of a read because it contains a lot of good and bad moments for me personally. And because of it my thoughts about this book are all over the place when it comes to this book. 

The writing style in this book was very good, show how it was available to suck me into the story against my will. It was like the author knew what words to use to completely grab my attention and to not let it go. 

Even thou the writing style was available to suck me into the story, some of the moments really throw me out of the beat and made me like “WTF an I reading?”. Because some moments in this book didn’t sit well with me. 

I Give This Book 3 / 5

Norway, 1662. A dangerous time to be a woman, when even dancing can lead to accusations of witchcraft. When Zigri, desperate and grieving after the loss of her husband and son, embarks on an affair with the local merchant, it’s not long before she is sent to the fortress at Vardø, to be tried and condemned as a witch.

Its important to say that I didn’t know anything about this book nor the author before picking up this book. This book was recommended to me by a staff members where I buy my books at.

Its also important to say that I DNF-ed this book after having read like 55% of it, but I will explain why I DNF-ed this book later on in this review.

In this book we follow two perspectives, one perspective is from Anna and the second perspective is from Ingeborg. And in my opinion the perspective from Anna was much more interesting than the perspective from Ingeborg. However both of the perspective were pretty boring and uninteresting.

The beginning of this book was actually interesting, but the further it got the more and more uninteresting and flat it became. It has something to do that the action we got in this book was written in a very uninteresting way. But also there were a lot of moments in this book were there like impossible moments would arrive and the characters were like “no worries I can climb a cliff side with only my hands and feet”.

The plot itself had good premise of witch hunt in Norway in the 1660s, but the way it was just presented to us just didn’t grab me and made interested enough to make me finish the book. Overall the way the plot it was presented to us gave me a huge feeling that this book was meant for preteen audience rather than it qualifying to the young adult category. But at the same time this book cant be meant for preteen audience because this book has some graphic scenes of sex and killing accused women of being witches.

The characters here were pretty flat, boring, uninteresting and shallow. Ingeborg had some character to her, but the rest of the characters we get in this book felt like the same character over and over again. And I personally had a very hard time remembering who’s who. 

The characters here weren’t engaging enough, and they were very hard to like. But also the dialogs between the characters felt like neither of the characters wanted to talk with each other 

The writing style here was very flat to be honest, it felt like it was written by a 15 year old rather than a 57-year old woman. The writing style feels like it was written for a younger audience but the scenes of sex and killing points towards a more older audience.

There were a lot of action in this book, but all that action which we got in this book, didn’t have any details and it felt more like it was just like “this happened, then that and that happened”. All the action in this book was briefly touched and nothing more than that.

I Give This Book 1 / 5

A Gentleman in Moscow immerses us in another elegantly drawn era with the story of Count Alexander Rostov. When, in 1922, he is deemed an unrepentant aristocrat by a Bolshevik tribunal, the count is sentenced to house arrest in the Metropol, a grand hotel across the street from the Kremlin. Rostov, an indomitable man of erudition and wit, has never worked a day in his life, and must now live in an attic room while some of the most tumultuous decades in Russian history are unfolding outside the hotel’s doors. Unexpectedly, his reduced circumstances provide him a doorway into a much larger world of emotional discovery.

I gotta say that I’ve had high expectations for this one, but it didn’t live up to these expectations. It means like the higher rating a book has on goodreads the lower my rating becomes for whatever mysterious reason. 

The plot itself is the overall about the Communist Russia where you aren’t allowed to speak about how fucked up Russia is but the main character got out of this trouble quit easily because he is a rich. And he spend the entire book yapping about how the world is unfair because his big apartment got taken away from him and he must live in much smaller apartment. 

The writing style is quit amazing, because it has the old timey vibe to it, but nothing more than this. It could have been much better if the author decided to not use so many words as he did in this book. It really seemed like the author was trying to put every word he knew in this book. 

The sentence structure is just insane in this one. Because it is bloated that it doesn’t even make sense sometimes. And the footnotes here are too many of them in this Novell. 

Everyone talks about how wonderful this novel is but in my opinion this novel is just a boring, stuffy and stodgy novel. 

This novel takes place in a period of 30 years. And there are times where characters disappears for year to just reappear again after like 20 years. This really annoyed me because it like deleting a part of the novel.

This book has talk a decent deal about best wines and best foods. And I don’t care for it. Of course I love food but when I’m picking a book I don’t want to read about how good expensive food and wine is. 

The main characters seemed like caricatures or a parody of a main character. And the amount of wine and other alcohol he drinks in this book is so unbelievable.

The descriptions in this one and the details are too much in this book. There will be couple of times where the author will spend one whole side describing nothing which brings something to the main story. 

The history aspect of this story is that it doesn’t make sense. Because while thousands of people have been killed during the Stalinist rule, our main character done a similar crime to people how have been murdered but he just gets the punishment to be locked in a luxury hotel and drink wine all day and do nothing.

I give this book 1 / 5