Review of 'Paris' on 'Goodreads'
4 stars
My wife and I are big fans of Edward Rutherfurd, and we had high expectations for this book (I'll admit to getting absurdly excited when I heard that it covered the Paris Commune, one of my favorite historical events). This is probably my least favorite Rutherfurd book, but that's like saying recent seasons of The Simpsons aren't as good as Golden Age Simpsons - true, but it leaves out the fact that even a past-its-prime Simpsons is still better than 75% of what's on TV. In Rutherfurd's case, Paris is still pretty good and well worth reading, just less so than his other books.
My biggest gripe is with the narrative structure. In Ruthfurd's books generally, he tells the story of a group of families in a given location over a long period of time, which could be hundreds or thousands of years (Sarum, his first book, began at the β¦
My wife and I are big fans of Edward Rutherfurd, and we had high expectations for this book (I'll admit to getting absurdly excited when I heard that it covered the Paris Commune, one of my favorite historical events). This is probably my least favorite Rutherfurd book, but that's like saying recent seasons of The Simpsons aren't as good as Golden Age Simpsons - true, but it leaves out the fact that even a past-its-prime Simpsons is still better than 75% of what's on TV. In Rutherfurd's case, Paris is still pretty good and well worth reading, just less so than his other books.
My biggest gripe is with the narrative structure. In Ruthfurd's books generally, he tells the story of a group of families in a given location over a long period of time, which could be hundreds or thousands of years (Sarum, his first book, began at the end of the last ice age and ended in the 1980s). It can be disorienting when you first start reading his books - i.e. suddenly the characters you've grown attached to are dead and you're reading about their grandchildren - but I've grown to like it. Paris is somewhat different - he mostly focuses on the same people for the entire book, telling their story from the 1870s in the wake of the Paris Commune up to the German occupation during World War II, while occasionally jumping back in time to tell a story in their families' pasts. I can't blame him for trying to experiment with his storytelling, but I didn't feel like the chapters jumping back in time really added much. They were interesting to read in and of themselves, but felt like a distraction from the main narrative.
