The View from 58-inches High

I gave this book three-stars. I don’t really know where to start with this book. If I had to sum this up in one word it would be overwhelming. I get the feeling that the author didn’t quite know who the audience for this book would be. The relationships and story lines are fairly complex and yet the author feels the need to constantly “sum up” the events of the previous chapters as if we were continuing from last weeks episode. The writing describing the characters motives were also very brute force, assuming the reader was too stupid to understand the characters well enough to understand the motives.

Second, there are so many stories, they are all good on their own or paired with one other, but all of these stories combined added to the weightiness of the book.  All of these characters are connected by loosely sown threads that are too coincidental to be believed. Tom finding Ellen who’s husband had a connection to the priory where Philip ends up. Philip saves Tom, Allen and Aliena. Aliena was engaged to the William who fired Tom and was given the title of Earl by a king put in place by a piece of information passed from Philip. With all that, I have not given a way anything about this book. There are ten more relationships within those. I suppose it could be argued that the upper class was a very tight nit community but that hardly explains the relationships to a mason and an outlaw. Furthermore, there is far too much happenstance.  Like when Philip just happened to be right next to Aliena at the market and that Aliena ends up in the same town as Jack which happens to be the same town the baby, born miles away, ends up at.

Finally, my biggest gripe with this book is that it was about 300 pages too long. I would have liked less plot twists and more subtlety. My favorite parts of this book were spent making rounding out the characters; such as Jacks storytelling and Tom’s love of cathedral architecture. There was not enough time spent on the emotional aspects of the characters and far too much time spent on their actions. There are three characters in the book that do nothing by “take revenge” on the “good” characters. The only motive seeming to be pride? These characters were hell bent on revenge even when revenge would benefit them in no way. By the end it felt like Wiley-coyote going after the road-runner again. Come on, the road-runner always wins!

Resentment burned in his stomach as he regarded Aliena’s prosperous, dignified, happy family. Everything they had should have been his. But he had not given up the hope of revenge.

Seriously, this would have been revenge number eight or nine. He’s in his 50’s at this point!