The Thirteenth Tale

by Diane Setterfield

Introduction and Acquisition: been hearing about the book all year, maybe it was the colorfully dark dust jacket - borrowed from Queens library, September 2007

The Good: good twisty plot, intriguing enough to keep me interested, keep me reading, enough to spend a whole day on it just to find out what happened. Good fluff novel in the realm of Dan Brown books.

The Bad: [*reactions in mid-read:] Not even through the first chapter, I am already disappointed with the sameness in voice between the first person narrative and the letter that is supposed to have been written by the mysterious Vida Winter. The first person narrative is already distinct in her choppy sentence fragments. Is this a clue, or bad writing? to be determined.

So far, the action is slow. For every present moment described, there follows a paragraph of unwieldy explanation. It's trying my patience. It is not a book that allows the imagination a chance to soar, for it tells you everything you need to know, like a certain ex-classmate of mine who insisted on telling you things you really did not care to know, information forced upon you in a most unpleasant way. Personal space is requested, please, in reading a book. We are offered none here.

[Reaction post-read:] too many repetition of the same gimmicks, e.g., reiteration of the same "favorite" novels seemed to contrite - the key to the whole mystery was not introduced until much later, sort of taking the fun out of reading a mystery novel hoping to be given the clue to figure it all out - flimsy explanation of Margaret's weightless mother - the twin thing seemed to be forced on Margaret's side, as I did not believe her anguish over her own lost twin - as somewhat mentioned above, the book was too tightly caged for the reader, no personal space to tickle one's intellectual imagination - do women really swoon over and over again when faced with a profound realization or thought? I thought not, and found it kind of silly. Was it three times that Margaret contracts vertigo at the realization of some profound thing? I thought she was an intellect, thus her mind must be stronger than that - Too much repetition kept the book from being believable in the most desired sense of the word. Rather than becoming one with the story, I remained a reader reading a book, words on a white paper sheet.