Cynthia Freeman

Interesting book. I liked that characters and the plot was interesting and mostly plausible. The narration was very well done.

Probably not to most of my friends. This book is kind of an intellectual exercise. Most of my friends would probably not be thrilled by that. Not to insult my friends' intellect, it's just that this book doesn't really have a compelling plot.

That was it!!! I was expecting a little bit more of a resolution.

Not that I'm aware of.

No, I can't see where another book would go. It seems like more of a stand-alone story to me. There's not a plot that lends itself to a sequel.

This book is well written but I wouldn't call it a truly compelling read. There were few places in the book where I was all that interested in finding out what was going to happen next.

It's pretty far down the list. Although it's well done, it's pretty depressing.

The book was full of plot twists. Not what you expect.

They did a good job of portraying the characters. They brought out my emotions.

This book is pretty evocative but the plot is not really my cup of tea. Call me old fashioned but I like to have at least one character that I really like and this book didn't offer that. In fact, I kind of felt like I needed to take a shower after I finished to wash off the depressing remnant of the ending. If you're looking for a happy ending, this is not the book for you.

You have to be a hard-core historian to really enjoy this book.

Cultured, dry, emotionless

Some of the really long passages in Latin.

I was doing OK with this book even though it's pretty dry material. I expected it to be a bit on the scholastic side. I know enough about Roman history that I was getting by and enjoying some of the bits and pieces. You have to have a pretty good knowledge of that history to even have a chance at understanding what is going on and recognizing the names. There are so many names to keep track of.

And then, I ran into an extraordinarily long passage in Latin that just about put me to sleep before the narrator finished it. Maybe if I understood Latin, I wouldn't have found this so irritating but it would have been better done by translation to English. I can't imagine that there are many who have a full enough knowledge of Latin to understand the passage.

Stephen King can write to evoke emotion, there's no doubt about that. My problem with most of his work is that it's so dark and the ending is usually pretty unhappy. That being said, this book comes the closest of anything of his I've read to having a happy ending.

I thought this book was rather better than the other reviewers did. It probably could have been tightened up a bit without damage but I thought the characters were well drawn and the plot was interesting. The narrator did an OK job but she seemed to get mixed up a bit with ascribing East coast accents to the Californian protagonist in places.

Contrary to the synopsis of this book, one thing this book is NOT, is funny. I mean, if you think it is, you must be a little twisted. It's well written and evokes a number of emotions but mirth is not one of them. I'm not terribly picky but this one is not really my cup of tea.