Pandora Inn

by Lliam West

Pandora Inn is historical fiction set largely between 1931-1985. Most of the action takes place in south Cornwall, particularly in the Truro/Falmouth area.

402 pages, Paperback

First published February 1, 2001

Reviews

[Alice-Elizabeth (Prolific Reader Alice) · Rating 2 out of 5]

Pandora Inn by Lliam West

Bookshop purchase

Historical Thriller for Adults

A thriller that looked promising until I started to read it. Then, I discovered things weren’t quite right.

From the cover and the story blurb, Pandora Inn looked well worth the money. Set in the areas of Falmouth and Truro in Cornwall (two places that I love visiting) I spent the last of my pocket money on a copy. Fast forward a few years later with a cup of tea in my hand and the book on my lap. Within the first few minutes of opening the book, I nearly spat out my tea. Here’s why.

I was so confused by what was going on. I re-read again and again. The author had decided to jump in a fifteen year time frame in just four or five pages. Don’t get me wrong, I love History but I would have preferred the pace to be slower so that I could really get a flavor of the historical importance that is Cornwall.

The flow I felt was choppy in places. I have to confess, I was only twelve when I started Pandora Inn. It’s quite young, I get that. But even years after that and picking up the novel to try and read it again just in the last couple of weeks posed me more questions than answers.

I had to give up reading after fifteen pages. It was starting to bother me that the plot was getting confusing. I feel that the author should tie in the events that happen in the story more to avoid confusion.

Even Pandora Inn has sold well in Cornwall and obviously, it is a popular read amongst adult readers. I came to the conclusion that it wasn’t for me. I won’t be reading the rest of the series.

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[Mavis Hewitt · Rating 2 out of 5]

Basically an adventure story, with some good characters, but if you want to understand the reasons behind it all, you either need to have a good knowledge of politics between the wars, or actually understand & learn what the writer tells you before moving on to the next page.

[Rob Beck · Rating 3 out of 5]

I found Pandora Inn to be very readable, but in my opinion badly in need of an edit. It is certainly a much better book that I would have imagined after reading some of the reviews (especially on Amazon). Lliam’s writing style is engaging at sentence and paragraph level, but at higher levels of granularity things start to get confused. There is a tendency to provide huge amounts of often historical and political information which quickly becomes overwhelming. Some of this information is undoubtedly important but I found it difficult to digest in that format. This is a shame, because it impacted my enjoyment of what is undoubtedly a good story. Page layout and general formatting also contribute to these issues.

The characters were easily identifiable. Although Steve, for example, seems overly well informed about about the politics and history of the recent past for a character who is often described as a boy. This appears to be in an attempt to impart vast amounts of historical information. There was also a lot of seemingly disconnected background information presented at the beginning of the story which makes it difficult to get into (and get past), but which is relevant later in the story.

Positives
Liam's writing style is very good.
Character development.

Negatives
Editing
Long info-dump chapters - these tend to be where I had trouble with character believeability (if that's a word!).
Editing (again ;) )

In summary, I think there is a good, well written story here that gets lost because of lack of editing.

[Michael Thorn · Rating 1 out of 5]

Somewhere in this book there is a good story trying to get out, but it is suppressed by pages and pages of turgid and stilted "conversation" concerning the UK and world history that has little relevance to the plot. With a good editor, the length of the text could be halved. The "Pandora Inn" of the title is false, because the inn barely appears in the book, and is certainly not the focus of the story. It just feels like a marketing trick to get readers to pick the book up and even buy it. Deeply disappointing.

[Becky · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book definitely didn’t quite seem to know whether it wanted to be a piece of fiction or a history lesson. The author definitely needs to work more on how to write women as well.

However overall I did enjoy it and think I learnt quite a bit too.

[Richard · Rating 1 out of 5]

This guy is a serious mansplainer. Almost nothing happens, every time you think the plot is about to get going it disappears again under pages of painfully detailed exposition, in the end one minor character dies and the whole thing reads like a political history dissertation. And why is it called Pandora Inn, the Inn is barely in it and has no bearing on the plot so the title appears to be nothing more than a shameless grab for the tourist dollar. Avoid.

[Andy Boot · Rating 1 out of 5]

Gave up half way thru. Didn't like it