A review by piercepd
Stoker's Manuscript by Royce Prouty
1.0
This was such a shame.
It's a great concept & it starts off well. The actual prose is intrusively American & one finds oneself filling in missing words or referring to Google to fill in the descriptions; similies which may be immediately familiar to an American audience are mostly mystifying to everyone else & the tone of language when referring to anything European (where the bulk of the book takes place) is very keen to underline that this is an irrelevant cultural backwater.
Then we come to the book itself. Instead of getting more & more involved, one actually seems to care less about the characters as things progress. Very few are fleshed out at all, apparent key figures just vanish & one isn't even named! The twists & turns are clumsy & abrupt & by the end you're almost hate-reading just to get to the end.
As I say, a real shame. I expected to love this & the further I read I felt the rating stars dropping away. Even when I started typing this I wanted to give it two stars but just couldn't bring myself so to do.
It's a great concept & it starts off well. The actual prose is intrusively American & one finds oneself filling in missing words or referring to Google to fill in the descriptions; similies which may be immediately familiar to an American audience are mostly mystifying to everyone else & the tone of language when referring to anything European (where the bulk of the book takes place) is very keen to underline that this is an irrelevant cultural backwater.
Then we come to the book itself. Instead of getting more & more involved, one actually seems to care less about the characters as things progress. Very few are fleshed out at all, apparent key figures just vanish & one isn't even named! The twists & turns are clumsy & abrupt & by the end you're almost hate-reading just to get to the end.
As I say, a real shame. I expected to love this & the further I read I felt the rating stars dropping away. Even when I started typing this I wanted to give it two stars but just couldn't bring myself so to do.