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blairconrad 's review for:
Bury Your Dead
by Louise Penny
Warning: this is the first Penny book I've read. I realize I'm coming in to book #6 of a series that features the same character, so this may not be a fair review. I normally wouldn't have started partway into a series, but it's the book my community chose for 2011's One Book, One Community effort, and I'm nothing if not compliant.
Kind of a disappointment, given the reviews that the book and series have gotten. A big part of that is probably missing backstory, as there are three mysteries going on in the book - one unfolding in real time, and two from the past.
I think at least one of the two past events was the subject of a previous book, and I'm left flat after being thrown onto it without the prior knowledge that the book ([b:The Brutal Telling|7017510|The Brutal Telling (Armand Gamache Series #5)|Louise Penny|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1256078422s/7017510.jpg|6639657]) would've given me. The way in which the mystery was reintroduced was even more off-putting, especially the extremely implausible justification the investigator gave to the locals for reexamining its events.
I think the other mystery from the past is the real reason that this book exists, since how Gamache's current actions and attitudes were shaped by that event are much more interesting than the current investigation. In fact, the only interesting passages in the book are related to this story. Unfortunately, there were way too few of those to carry this book.
I found Penny's prose to be much less interesting than I expected from the other reviews here. There were a number of places where I thought I detected an attempt to make a beautiful or noteworthy phrase, but by and large these fell a little short of the mark, and were more jarring than anything else.
The characters were also not very interesting, with only Gamache being developed at all.
While I'm on a roll, I have another complaint - the author changes point of view entirely too frequently - often from one paragraph to the next, with nearly no warning, prompting the reader to do a double-take and reread passages to understand who's thinking what. This was really jarring, and markedly lessened my enjoyment of the book.
Kind of a disappointment, given the reviews that the book and series have gotten. A big part of that is probably missing backstory, as there are three mysteries going on in the book - one unfolding in real time, and two from the past.
I think at least one of the two past events was the subject of a previous book, and I'm left flat after being thrown onto it without the prior knowledge that the book ([b:The Brutal Telling|7017510|The Brutal Telling (Armand Gamache Series #5)|Louise Penny|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1256078422s/7017510.jpg|6639657]) would've given me. The way in which the mystery was reintroduced was even more off-putting, especially the extremely implausible justification the investigator gave to the locals for reexamining its events.
I think the other mystery from the past is the real reason that this book exists, since how Gamache's current actions and attitudes were shaped by that event are much more interesting than the current investigation. In fact, the only interesting passages in the book are related to this story. Unfortunately, there were way too few of those to carry this book.
I found Penny's prose to be much less interesting than I expected from the other reviews here. There were a number of places where I thought I detected an attempt to make a beautiful or noteworthy phrase, but by and large these fell a little short of the mark, and were more jarring than anything else.
The characters were also not very interesting, with only Gamache being developed at all.
While I'm on a roll, I have another complaint - the author changes point of view entirely too frequently - often from one paragraph to the next, with nearly no warning, prompting the reader to do a double-take and reread passages to understand who's thinking what. This was really jarring, and markedly lessened my enjoyment of the book.