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Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell Signed
I am an avid reader, and enjoy the fantasy genre. However I found this book impossibly slow and boring. I gave up after two hundred pages, and I almost always finish books that I begin. It seems that most of the reviewers enjoyed the book. Perhaps I have poor taste in books, or Susanna Clarke has lots of relatives.
Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell Signed
My husband purchased this book for me after he read a review that raved about it. He went to a great deal of trouble to track the book down and get it for me for Christmas. If he hadn't gone to all the trouble, I would have chunked this in the trash after 2 or 3 pages. More than 800 pages later, I felt like I'd been trapped in a Seinfeld episode (not much happening, but spending a lot of time talking about it) without the laughs. Unfortunately, he bought 2 of her books for me so I also read the book of short stories - The Ladies of Grace Adieu and Other Stories - it was marginally better as the stories were short.
Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell Signed
What a great waste of time, and 782 pagers of paper stock. I give the book only 1 star out of respect for an author that can string together that many words. The book would have been a halfway ok at half the number of pages. It's a frustrating read filled with half-baked characters and a story line that does not hold together. But, more importantly, it's such and uninteresting book to read. Unless you have a fetish for 19th century English culture. Otherwise, as a fantasy, it's a dud. [...]
Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell Signed
I was utterly devastated to see all the rave reviews of this book turn out to be completely untrue. The story is written in a VERY dry, rambling style with ubiquitous footnotes - many of which are almost an entire page long and totally off subject! I waited patiently for the pace to pick up, but it never did. It was only in the last 100 pages of the book that my imagination was finally prodded out of coma-mode. This book is defnitely NOT worth the $30!
Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell Signed
I enjoy big fat books, Dickens, fantasy, a wide variety of books of all kinds. Somehow this book was beyond strange, it simply had no point, no tension, it was almost a documentary on 2 made-up magicians in a fantasy world. Worse, I kept expecting it to get better, to go SOMEWHERE with all of this other than just random imaginings with no real connecting theme. After all, so many critics raved about it. So I read about 600 pages before I dumped it in the garbage, a fate that very few of my books ever suffer.
Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell Signed
I won't try to write a clever review of this book discussing the range of the characters and so forth. I am going to be honest and straightforward. Simply put, this was a very long, boring book that went off on tangents with footnotes galore. The author might have thought this quaint, but it only added to the tedium. I only mildly enjoyed the last 100 pages of the book and forced myself to finish it.There are many more books out there worth the time and effort, but not this one. Too bad too...the storyline had potential.