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3.0 out of 5 stars
Interesting concept, poor execution., Mar 17 2004
I was debating back and forth about whether to dish out $23 for a soft cover book, but finally my interest in Roman culture won out and I bought it. Well, I've finished reading this novel, and was not very impressed by the quality of the writing. The plotline is, as the other reviews have said, highly original. Miranda is a Harvard graduate student who reluctantly volunteers to go travel back to Roman times and soak up the culture for research. However, unlike a Michael Chrichton novel, Ms. East does not go into how the time travel technology actually works.What I found particularly irritating about this novel is the amount of repetition and over-simplification bulit into the plot and prose. For example, around p. 3 the heroine Miranda remarks that a friend commented on her "pre-Raphaelite hair". This sentence is repeated mid-way through the book, almost word for word. Likewise, the novel goes off on these tangents in which Miranda tells a fairy-tale to her rapt Roman household members. Each time, she begins with "And this how I told it:". After a while, the cumulating repetitions numbed my brain and pricked my impatience. I also found the narrator's smug attitude towards the reader irritating. Everything is dumbed-down for us. For example, Miranda speculates at one point that the nearest city is Neapolis--then, in brackets, she tells us that this is modern day Naples. Well, duh. It makes me wonder what kind of an audience Ms. East was writing for--adults? Or 7th graders? I think Ms. East demonstrates a lot of creativity in the character of Miranda, the time travel plot, and in the cast of supporting characters. However, there is a marked lack of sophistication in the quality of the prose.
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