A review by jessie_pea90
The City of Tears by Kate Mosse

adventurous informative medium-paced

• Strong character development? No

3.0

Another book where due to time constraints I decided to try on audio instead, and unfortunately I feel the audio probably did not do this book justice.

The sequel to The Burning Chambers, I wasn’t sure where this book was going to start as it had another ‘modern’ chapter to begin before getting back to France in the 1500’s, the War of Religions and our characters from book one, Minou and family. Thankfully that first chapter did later make a little sense but I’m still to see the point of these and wonder if they will come to fruition in book three. 

This book includes most of the same cornerstones as its predecessor: history, family drama and a heap of secrets but this time no love story, although I didn’t miss it.

I found it a little hard to follow at times, and felt that the plot dragged in parts. I feel this could be partially due to the narrator who I found didn’t have the most distinction between voices and also the amount of names of characters and the range of locations and timeframes of events. All of which I found hard to keep track of when it was easy to zone out.

I felt that after the drama of the first section (set against the St. Bartholomew’s massacre) the story became stilted and fell into ‘middle book syndrome’ territory.

Despite following the same characters as the first book, my previous sentiments still stand that it’s not a sequel that needs reading and I feel if I had rated book one lower I wouldn’t have bothered. However this book does end of a bit of a cliffhanger which makes me interested in book three - The Ghost Ship.