A review by megea
Cathedral of the Sea by Ildefonso Falcones

2.0

The best I can say for Cathedral of the Sea is that it goes quickly enough. The prose is so simple and didactic, it reads as if it's written for a child. (Which it clearly isn't, given some of the content...) There’s just too much explication. Of the characters, of their state of mind, of the historical background. The latter is especially intrusive (and much of the time isn't even necessary to understand the action at hand). Either the 3rd person narrator or one of the characters themselves is constantly pausing to explain the social or political reasons behind things, whether or not it’s appropriate for them to even have that knowledge. And that isn’t the only aspect of the characters that isn’t credible. The bad characters are wholly bad, the good ones wholly good, sickeningly so. To make matters worse, the plot didn’t interest me enough to overcome my distaste for everything else.