Witty Little Knitter

I realized something: I do want to know how this story finishes but I couldn't care less about how we reach the end. I have never been somebody who skips a part of the book and reads the last chapter (I did it once...a deadly boring book I had to review) but this is the first time I'm tempted to do it.

More ramblings behind the Read More

I did a 'Non-Fiction Writing course' one semester. We could write about anything we wanted there as long as we handed in a text every week. I ended up writing about books a lot. In one text I explained why I liked Elizabeth George's books better than Henning Mankell's. It boiled down to this:
Both authors write about tragic and tortured characters, in both books horrible things happen to the main-characters (and to the side-characters, to the one-off-characters and to the character's pets) but George always manages a sparkle of hope. Life sucks but at least we have each other and together we might make it through this was something I took from her books (not the most cheerful life-lesson but Mankel's is basically Life sucks, there's nothing you can do about it and everybody you love will leave you).

This is no longer the case in this book. Now everything sucks for everybody, anything that could go wrong does go wrong and I can't imagine that there's any redemption for anybody.

Aditionally there's smaller things: Barbara seems to have fallen in a stupid-well that turned her back into the person she was at the beginning of the series...(honestly...I can't even imagine old Barbara doing some of the stuff she does now...there's acting irrational because it's about somebody you care about and there's acting completely stupid because the plot demands it and the author can add more drama that way).

Apart from that there's the fact that one of the things that sold that series to me was the relationship and interaction between Barbara and Lynley. For a variety of reasons the last couple of books where already short on that and I had really hoped that things would get back to normal again in this book but again it's not the case. They're sperated again (in different countries for God's sake) and Lynley is mad at Barbara...mad enough that I'm not sure if there is a 'back to normal' and I don't like this at all.

I might take a break from this and finish my angst-ridden gay Age-of-Sail romance first. At least that's less depressing angst (it's just torture, imprisonment and the constant fear of being executed for what you are...yup and it's really less depressing than George)