Quite honestly I can’t stand only a few books that I’ve read, recently The Awakening by Nora Roberts.
Holy crap, do I reallllyyyyy want my money back. I was bored. So. Bored. The magic system was subpar, the characters just….ew, everything was so, so boring. The MC is an idiot.
What book is a zero star read for you?
To this day, I still can’t believe I read an 1100 page book about the building of a church. And the fact that I loved it is even more surprising. Mad props to you for finishing such a long book that you despised.
It’s a medieval soap opera with a dash of architecture thrown in, but I loved it. Also made me appreciate cathedrals more!
This is my pitch to everyone I’m trying to convince to read it. Looping the historical inspiration full circle, I say it’s like a “non fantasy” Game of Thrones
A student recommended the first book to me, and it quickly became one of my most recommended historical fictions for my students because it’s one of the most thoroughly, perfectly researched books I’ve read in the genre…and it helps that it has a soap opera drama which also happens to illustrate major contextual details and themes for the time period.
It’s one thing to tell people how massive an undertaking, how violent a process, how often disastrous the result, how through transformed a region could be by, and how politically tricky it was building cathedrals in the middle ages, but having this character driven story makes that lesson intensely human and relatable - which is exactly what historians do, find the human story in the details.
I’m waitlisted (and I got on the list about a month before it dropped… That’s how popular it is) for the latest book in the series on Libby and I just can’t wait, lol. I’m number 8, so hopefully in the next few weeks.