The Stone Carvers: Amazon.ca: Books

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Customer Reviews

11 Reviews

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(2)
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Average Customer Review

4.1 out of 5 stars (11 customer reviews)

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4 of 5 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars An interesting history lesson, Nov 8 2002

By A Customer

This review is from: The Stone Carvers (Paperback)

The idea for this book is fascinating - Urquhart uses as the centrepiece the building of the Canadian war memorial at Vimy Ridge. The history she provides is something that every Canadian should know and is probably unaware of. She uses the war memorial as a symbol of both obsession and redemption.

Urquhart very convincingly conveys the futility of war and depicts how young men go off to war for all the wrong reasons - hoping to fly an airplane, for instance.

Urquhart's strenth as a writer is her ability to paint beautiful pictures with words - her description is unsurpassed. She uses symbols quite well, although at times not subtly enough. In this book, the bird imagery was a little overdone when it came to Tilman. However, she portrays the grand sweep of history while, at the same time, evoking the mood and atmosphere of a small Ontario town.

The weakness in this book is the characterization - for the most part, these characters are one-dimensional and just not believable as real people. For one thing, they are too nice. It is hard to believe that Tilman, on his own since the age of 6 and losing a leg in the war, would not be more bitterly scarred than he is.

Read this book for the beauty of the images and for the history lesson. If you're looking for great characters, you won't find them here. The flaw with this book is that the characters are just not deep enough to adequately deal with the grand themes of obsession and redemption.

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4 of 5 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Worth the wait!, May 22 2002

By A Customer

This review is from: The Stone Carvers (Hardcover)

As historical fiction, Jane Urquhart's new book "The Stone Carvers" had the same immense impact for me that Taylor Caldwell's "Dear and Glorious Physician" did many years ago. There are several good summaries of the plot above, so I won't go into that here. (I will say that the character of Tilman reminded me so much of Mary in Urquhart's "Away", though!) I've been fortunate to read lots of good Canadian literature recently such as "From Bruised Fell" by Jane Finlay-Young and "A Good House" by Bonnie Burnard. Although I was given "The Stone Carvers" as a gift in November, it was only recently, after finishing "What's Bred in the Bone" by Robertson Davies and wanting more good Canadian literature, that it felt like the time to read this. And it was. Once begun, I could not bear to put this book down each night. The characters' humanness and deeply felt emotions, like those in Urquhart's "Away", got under my skin and I could not wait to find out what happened as the story moved along. This book is intelligent in a way not many are these days, directly addressing the longings of the heart. In my estimation, you can't go wrong reading this book. After reading "Away", I had a deep longing to visit Ireland and Wales; now, having just read "The Stone Carvers", a visit to the monument at Vimy seems inevitable too. I love the quote from the review above about the redemptive nature of art - this book itself proves that to be true. Enjoy!

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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful

3.0 out of 5 stars Not bad, Feb 27 2007

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Jubejube - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Stone Carvers (Paperback)

This book is a pretty easy read, and gets quite enjoyable if you put a bit of imagination into it. I don't know if I find the main character's relationships to one another all that believable, but I think the author does really well at painting symbolisms for the reader to explore meanings and emotions. It isn't a gripping storyline, but makes you want to read more to see how things become resolved. I would recommend this book for romantics and those with a taste for artistic imagery. Those who are looking for a page-turner may not be happy with this one.

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