The Thirteenth Tale

The Thirteenth Tale: A Novel by Diane Setterfield was suggested by my book club.  I picked it up at the library so that I could finish it before we met.  I was reading some other books and I decided that a week would be plenty of time.  I was wrong!!

The book starts off with a letter being delivered to the door of a small and obscure father daughter run bookstore.  Margaret Lea reads the letter which is a request to write the memoirs or biography of famous author, Vida Winter.  There is a brief background on Margaret's life growing up with her mother and father and only being close to her father because her mother is very closed off.  She has a love for reading and she is excited to settle into bed every night because of the pile of books that she gets to read before falling asleep.  She prefers older books that are classics and doesn't read modern written works.  She decides to accept the invitation to Ms. Winter's home to meet this famous author after reading a rare copy of her Thirteenth Tale book from her fathers shop (and a few other books that she picks up at the local bookstore) because she is interested in the authors writing style and mystery.  The rest of the book is the telling of Ms. Winter's story through details given by Ms. Winter and others that are discovered through the research of Margaret. 

It took me a long time to write this review because I am at a loss on what to say but I would probably not recommend it for reading.  So many people that I talked to loved the book so I kept giving it another chance and I was trying to read the first book club book so I was hoping it would get better for me.  But this book took me forever to get into the beginning and even when the plot picked up and got more interesting, it was not the first thing that I thought about spending my free time reading.  Although I would not let myself pick up another book until I was done.

There were a lot of characters and the plot moved back and forth between current day and past without a lot of references so it was hard to follow at first.  In addition, the author was really verbose and it took her a page to describe something that should have taken a quick sentence.  The author was also quick to point out things over and over that should have been left up to the reader to determine their feelings.  I was glad that I read it but more glad when it was over.  I hate giving up on a book and I really thought that this was going to be the time that I did that.  Luckily, I had a friend to help talk me through it and she worked to finish it too (Thanks Denise!)  The book overall gave me flash backs to required reading in high school and I wasn't happy.

What did you think of this book after reading it??  I have to go to book club to talk about this so I would love some feed back before I get into a room of people that I don't know and tell them that I disliked the book that they liked so much.