AUTHOR: Matthew Pearl
STARTED: January 20, 2015
FINISHED: March 3, 2015
PAGES: 380
GENRE: Fiction
FIRST SENTENCE: John Kurtz, the chief of the Boston police, breathed in some of his heft for a better fit between the two chambermaids.
SUMMARY: [From BN.com] Boston, 1865. A series of murders, all of them inspired by scenes in Dante’s Inferno. Only an elite group of America’s first Dante scholars—Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Oliver Wendell Holmes, James Russell Lowell, and J. T. Fields—can solve the mystery. With the police baffled, more lives endangered, and Dante’s literary future at stake, the Dante Club must shed its sheltered literary existence and find the killer.
THOUGHTS: I should have loved this book. It has everything I like: historical setting, bookish theme, detailed writing, etc. But now, I loathed every minute of reading this book. From the very first pages, I knew this was going to be a struggle to read. There was just "too much" in this novel. Too many characters, too much back-story, too much description. I lost interest so fast that I'm surprised I managed to finish this thing at all. I just didn't give a hoot about the characters or the story in general. Every time something happened to advance the plot or a character, I mentally did this: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
The only passage of this novel I enjoyed reading was the back story of the murder. That's it.
RATING: 2/10 [Awful]
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