Bookish Nerds :D discussion

Come and join us as we read and discuss this book for our September book of the month :)

So, I'm about halfway though and I like it a lot, though it can be a bit exhausting, since there are so many characters and especially character names.

Island uses a system to name the child after the father, so everyone has different surname, but sometimes you have no idea if the people are related, because some names come up several times. So is Jonsson the son of this Jon, or another one? Who knows?
Also the author scatters islandic poems and sentences around, with an translation after, but still, what's the point? I can't even read it out lout, the letters are different from ours.

Besides that I find the story of Agnes pretty interesting. I like that the book start with other peoples perception of her and only afterwards we get to know her. Most of it is told through other peoples eyes as well, there are just a few glimpses into her head.

It does a good job of keeping the tension up. I have no idea if Anges did those things she'd been sentenced for, or if it's something entirely different, though I have the feeling she didn't. There's at least more to the story than is told, that much is clear.

I am glad you are enjoying this book :) I hope to read this sometime this month but I am in a reading slump so I don't know whether I will get to it.

I haven't managed to get hold of this yet as I am moving house in a week! So I had to take all my library books back and forbid myself from getting any more out but it's on my TBR list so you know, one day...

I've finished it now. I thought the second half was not nearly as interesting as the first. It's mostly just Agnes story in the end, and I thought it started to be fairly obvious what was going on at some point.

Also, I thought the people stayed pretty one-dimensional. Their feeling where not portrait all that well and they fell kinda flat after a while.
Also, I did not understand why the author decided that the priest trying to help Agnes needed to be out of the way for the end of the book. He fell ill and did not visit for most of the last half of the book until the end.
There where a few plot points that there brought up, that never got addressed decently.

I wasn't a big fan of the end. It was already clear, what will happen, this is based on historic facts, after all, but I though it was handled quite abruptly and not very well. It lacked emotion, it probably lacked emotion for most of the book. I felt a certain detachment to most of it, like a documentary.

I'm a bit disappointed in the book, since it started very strongly, but could not keep the momentum going and got stale soon enough.