Quercus The Bookseller of Inverness

vond het prachtig aansluiten bij 'Culloden'

Das Buch hätte sehr viel Potenzial, aber es war mir zu abgehackt, zu viele Sprünge, zu viele Dinge, die ich nicht verstand (ein Glossar wäre hilfreich gewesen), die Charaktere waren nicht wirklich sympatisch, die Reaktionen nicht logisch. Das war nicht mein Ding, auch wenn sich manche Stellen gut lasen. 3.8 Sterne.

It was a DNF for me unfortunately.

The title, the book cover, and the customer rating seemed promising to of a cool, sophisticated, historical mystery. Unfortunately, from the start, the reader is immediately barraged with too much dry information and too many character names without being given an emotional stake in the story. As I read on, I eventually found that there was actually a story that I could become invested in. However, I don’t feel it was worth the all effort incumbent upon me to find it. Ultimately, I think the author has significant potential, but they may require more assistance of editors in order to eliminate the dry details that detract from the overall narrative.

I tried hard to like this book, and I read it all the way to the end. In the end, though, it just didn't do it for me. I had previously read the first in the Seeker series, and found it frankly dull and populated by cardboard characters. The Bookseller.... offered an attractive location and premise -- Inverness and the Jacobite rebellions -- so I bought it, deciding to give S. G. MacLean another try. The Bookseller.... is well-written, and the author does get a good sense of time and place. Her knowledge and research are evidently first class. Some of the scenes depicted, both of conflict and of social events, are very well done. The characters -- Hector MacGillivray, his son Iain, the British 'redcoat' officers, the Grandes Dames and the other ladies -- are well drawn. The Scots Gaelic is excellent -- easily understandable in original to this Irish reader. As regards the tale itself, the points of reference are the Jacobite rebellions of 1715 and 1745, aimed at restoring to the Stuart family the throne lost by the flight of James II in 1688. The story is set in 1752. The elder MacGillivray fought in both; his son in "the '45". The Jacobites were vanquished, but they are still there and furious resentment still smoulders. Iain is the eponymous bookseller. He has a copy of a book that contains a coded list of traitors to the Jacobite cause. Through the story, we see a number of these alleged traitors murdered by the Jacobite side. The rebel aspiration is to launch a further attempt at rebellion (the Elibank plot). To this end, Hector MacGillivray plies back and forth between Scotland and France where the Jacobite King-in-waiting (Charles Edward Stuart, Bonnie Prince Charlie) resides in exile. That's as much as I can summarise as bald facts. From there, I think it's the story that lets the book down. It meanders and wanders rather, somehow lacking focus. The Prologue starts in London in 1716, quickly shifting to the aftermath of the Battle of Culloden in 1746. Nearly all that follows is set in Inverness. We see much social interaction and depiction of 1750s Highland life (both interesting). There is also a lot of to-ing and fro-ing between castles and other Highland locations, showing the MacGillivrays always in peril and forever having close shaves with the redcoats. But I have difficulty identifying a thread or theme to the tale.... the answer to the question "what's happening and why?". It's like a bunch of scenes in sequence, with little rhyme or reason that I could detect. And the scenes set in the Prologue didn't, for me, get resolved later. Near the end (more than 300 pages in), I frankly lost heart and stopped caring. While reading the book, I did stop and brush up a bit on my Scottish history, the better to understand what was going on. It didn't seem to work. Maybe I just somehow don't "get it" -- I do see all the 4- and 5-star reviews. But this book didn't tell me a joined-up story, and I think my judgement of these things is mostly quite good. Two and a half stars; benefit of the doubt rounds up to three.