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4.0 out of 5 stars
THINGS ARE NOT ALWAYS WHAT THEY SEEM..., Jun 22 2008
This was my first book by this author, and I was not disappointed, as I found it to be a very creative and inventive book with some genuinely spooky moments. It started off a little slowly but then quickly picked up momentum.
The book revolves around Quentin Fears, whose childhood was marred by the tragic death of his beloved sister. Though it left him emotionally crippled, it did not stop him from discovering a talent he had for making money. Independently wealthy, his life is a fairly reclusive one, until he meets the women of his dreams, the mysterious Madeleine, a woman about whom he knows little. After a brief courtship, he marries her. After all, for him it was love at first sight.
When he finally goes to her family homestead in upstate New York and meets her family, a motley and bizarre crew at best, he realizes that he may have bitten off more than he can chew. It seems that Madeleine has a secret, and had she shared it with Quentin when they had first met, he most certainly would not have married her. You see, Madeleine is not exactly as she seems.
This is a wonderfully inventive and genuinely spooky book that has some great moments. Towards the end, however, the story sort of gets away a bit from the author. Still, this is a very entertaining read and one that will make me look for this author again.
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4.0 out of 5 stars
Could be better...but could be a LOT worse, Jan 24 2004
Sure, I was thrown for a loop by the abrupt twist in the story midway through. But Card's knack for thinking forward and arranging odd things that become clear later in the story shines through here, just as in his other novels. Not everything can be Ender's Game, but it can still be good, and Treasure Box certainly is. I consider Stephen King, personally, to be the best modern writer of characters, but Card is no slouch, and even his supernatural beings come across real enough to have me glancing about my shadowy room while reading this at night. You can feel what Quentin feels. This may be Card's most atmospheric work (I haven't read all his novels) and there are some genuinely spooky scenes. No, it will never stand as his greatest achievement alongside Speaker for the Dead and Enchantment, etc., but it's still Card, and it's still great, and this is NOT a waste of time.
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4.0 out of 5 stars
fascinating!, Nov 29 2003
I have never read a book by this author before (at least, that I can recollect) and so didn't know what to expect. I was pleasantly rewarded. The book starts out with ten year old Quentin Fears fighting for the life of his sister who the doctors say is brain-dead as a result of an accident. When he finally accepts the truth and allows the doctors and his parents to pull the plug so that others may be able to use some of her organs before it is too late for them to be of help to the recipients, he doesn't tell anyone of his conversation with his sister just prior to his decision. The impact of losing his sister turns him into a recluse of sorts who excells intellectually but has little interaction with the opposite sex as he is growing up because no one could match the image or qualifications of his dear lost sister. He ends up a very rich man at a relatively young age and about the time he finally realizes what he has been missing in not having a regular kind of relationship with a woman and decides to go looking for a mate, he just happens to run into the woman of his dreams, Madeleine. She is everything he has ever dreamed of in a woman, and surprise, she reminds him of deceased sister, Lizzy. They marry. They have been married for quite a while, and yet he hasn't met her family. When she finally agrees to take him to visit them, with warnings that they are a little different, he finds she wasn't kidding. The chauffeur delivers them to a three story house that was built in the eighteen hundreds. It is there that he begins to notice a change in Madeleine's personality. The family is indeed strange, and then Madeleine confronts her grandmother, and demands, that since she is now married that she is entitled to the inheritance she was promised, the contents in the treasure box. When Madeleine asks Quentin to open the box, he hesitates, because of her strange behavior. This makes her go into a fit of rage and run out of the house. When Quentin follows to console her, he finds she has disappeared. There are no footprints in the snow of hers where they should be and when he returns to the house, he finds, instead of the well kept and beautiful house he just left shortly before, a house with the furniture covered and layers of dust and no sign that anyone else had been there but himself. Madeleine has disappeared and he can't find a record of her existence anywhere. He has the mystery of her disappearance, and in finding out what is in the treasure box and why it was so important to her, to solve. I don't want to spoil the book for you by telling you too much, but rather urge you to read it yourself. When I first started the book I thought it was just a regular type mystery but as I got into it, it veered off in a whole new direction, keeping my imagination purring until the end.
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