This book started out wonderfully! It had so much potential and I loved every part of it….The shy hero who hid in a world of books and avoided the “real world”….the hero finding his true loves, first in books and then in a shy young girl….Shakespeare (seriously!!! How can you not get excited about a book that is partly about Shakespeare?)…..old books treated with love and great affection….Lovett gave us love, mystery, century old rivalries, serious bibliophiles, forgery, mystery, murder and personal redemption….however, somewhere along the way this simply turned into a poorly made for television movie that was oh so predictable at the end….

I’ve never read a book that fascinated me so much at times and bored me so completely at other times…Parts of the book were so detailed that I was enchanted with it…I found myself having to slow my pace down. I was so excited by what I was reading that I had to breathe deep and try not to rush ahead…..sadly, it seemed that the further the book went along that the detailed parts had no real meaning, and the parts that were important to the story had very few details. I felt that Lovett just put out a major puzzle piece to the story and just expected us to take it at face value and did not share with us the pieces that finally made the mystery complete. I felt greatly disjointed towards the last 3rd of the book….the great pain that Lovett seemed to take in the beginning to supply us with all the details we needed, seemed like it was too much a bother at the end. I felt that he just wanted to hurry and wrap things up to get this book off to the publishers. The ending really did strike me as a neatly packaged, wrap up everything in a pretty bow, type Hollywood ending…..my least favorite type….Even though I loved parts of this book, I’m not sure I would feel comfortable recommending it to others….

Review copy provided from NetGalley

~ Urania

Buy It Now The Bookman’s Tale: A Novel of Obsession