I was surprised how well-written and interesting this book turned out to be. I was also surprised that it turned out to be in the genre of magical realism, not just a story of medieval Europe and the plague. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
First of all, this is a scary book. It reminded me a bit of The Witcher – but with a more religious theme. There is gore and violence and death and it sometimes seems like a horror movie. But you learn to like the characters and they develop and overcome obstacles in their quest to help a little girl do something that even she doesn\u2019t quite understand.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The author really brought this to life – there is the filth of living in poverty in that age, seeing the rich and the powerful, and all being subjected to disease, demons, and temptation. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
The story itself takes some dramatic turns (with allusions to some biblical stories) and I genuinely didn\u2019t know what would be the outcome. Sacrifice? Salvation? The epilogue was also extremely well-written – and made the character development much more satisfying.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Despite the dialogue and tone sometimes being a little too modern\/casual I thought this was one of the better books I have read, certainly in the top five of this year so far. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Next I am reading Memory Wall by Anthony Doerr.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I was surprised how well-written and interesting this book turned out to be. I was also surprised that it turned out to be in the genre of magical realism, not just a story of medieval Europe and the plague. First of all, this is a scary book. It reminded me a bit of The Witcher […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[14],"class_list":["post-3670","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-books"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pOpl7-Xc","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3670","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3670"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3670\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3670"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3670"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3670"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}