Review: Here be Dragons

Here be Dragons by Sharon Kay Penman
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

After not writing a review for so long, I am afraid I must again learn to organize my thoughts and to set them down in an enjoyable or at least informative manner. I am not quite there yet, and s o this might feel more than a little stilted and awkward (not helped by the fact that English is not my native tongue.) In any case, I apologize. To help myself a bit, I went back to organizing my ideas regarding five different aspects:

Prose: 5/5 stars
If there is one thing that initially caught and charmed when I first started reading this book, it was its prose. The way scenes, inner thoughts, and historical snippets were written was truly marvellous and a pleasure. if there were times when I tired of the book and put it away, it was never because of any technical fault or flaw in the writing.

Pacing: 2/5 stars
If the book has an enemy, I think it is its own pacing. The constants jumps from scene to scene, from year to year were tiresome and jarring and usually forced me to put down the book for a while. I suppose this might have been to keep in hand with known dates and events, perhaps. In keeping with the historical part of this history But if so, I think I would have preferred more vagueness, more drawing upon her own imagination and less keeping in fact with reality, because in my opinion it is the one thing that makes the book rather tedious to read.

Plot: 3/5 stars
From reading the synopsis, one might expect the story to centre immediately upon Joahnna and Llewelyn's joint troubles. For better and for worse, this only happens after we get a sizeable number of pages introducing us to the lives of the three big players: John, Joahnna, and Llewelyn. This is not terrible, by any means. It works specially well in the case of John and his daughter, but it can nonetheless feel plodding at times.

Characterization: 4/5 stars
I can honestly say I've seldom had more fun with a novel's characters. From the first they always feel very much alive and vibrant. My only qualm, as I mentioned during the reading, is the way we are often treated to more than one character's inner thought in any one scene. The switching about is awkward and jarring, even if it never gets outright confusing. I can understand why the author did this- specially when one more than one character were thinking the same while expecting the worse from each other, as it fuelled these scenes with poignancy and irony and the like, but I think I would have liked it better if she had kept to one's character head per scene, or per chapter or very much anything else but this awkward juggling.

World-Building: 5/5 stars
Not much to say here, except that the world feels as lively and genuine and well-crafted as the characters. It certainly feels consistent with itself, and with what I know of the period (which is admittedly not much, as while I love history, I am far from an expert on it). It was certainly an interesting and realistic window into a much romanticised period.

Overall: 4/5
All things considered, the book is a joy to read. It has its small number of flaws, certainly, but the positives far outweigh the negatives, and if you forgive the slow beginning, I can assure you that you are going to get completely caught up in the story it tells. You will sheer, and you will cringe, and you will stare in abject horror, because in the end it is just that good of a book.

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