PhoenixFalls - , reviewed on 7/2/2010 + 185 more book reviews

Helpful Score: 1

This was rough going. Though I have loved Dumas in the past (The Count of Monte Cristo is one of my favorite novels of all time) I really struggled through the first 500+ pages of this 700 page book. The characters are caricatures, dashing and hot-tempered and filled with an utter disregard for human life -- including their own. They act with little to no motivation, running people through for slights and getting involved in court intrigue for no reason I can discover -- all of which would be fine and which I expected. What I did not expect was how idiotic they all are, petulant and whimsical and all in all no better equipped to exist in the world than a 3-year old.

The novel did finally pick up at the very end, when Dumas let Milady run away with it. All of a sudden it was sweeping and grand and romantic and tragic -- Milady is a character that very much deserves her own novel, and one in which the author (or the translator -- I was reading the Lord Sudley translation which I have heard is rather Victorian in its moral outlook) doesn't pause every scene with at least one diatribe about how she is evil incarnate and unwomanly (a sin he seems to find rather worse than the first). The final hundred pages I read breathlessly, the way I read all 1300 pages of The Count of Monte Cristo. I just wish I didn't have to wade through all the incomprehensible fluff that got me there.

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