Rating:  -
Kate Mosse's Sepulchre is a historical fantasy -- historical fiction with fantastic elements. I enjoy both genres, and this novel features a female graduate student (somebody I can relate to) as one of the main characters, and it's available on audiobook, so I thought it would be good entertainment on my commute. I got about ten chapters in before quitting.
The book seems well-researched, is competently written, the tone switches easily and successfully from past to present and back, and the characters are interesting enough. Here is the problem: It is full of enormous amounts of tedious descriptions of ancient and current French landmarks, French historical events, French historical figures, and untranslated French dialogue. I realize, of course, that France is the setting of this historical novel, but the effect of all of this name-dropping is to make me think that Ms Mosse feels the need to prove she did her research -- she's trying too hard, and it comes off as pretentious. And obnoxious. Especially when I'm listening to it in audio format and I can't just skim over the French words. Here are some examples (some are from later in the book):
"It was not quite dawn, yet Paris was waking. In the distance, Anatole could hear the sounds of delivery carts. Wooden traps over the cobbles, delivering milk and freshly baked bread to the cafes and bars of the Faubourg Montmartre. He stopped to put on his shoes. The rue Feydeau was deserted; there was no sound except the clip of his heels on the pavement. Deep in thought, Anatole walked quickly, to the junction with the rue Saint-Marc, intending to cut through the arcade of the Passage des Panoramas. He saw no one, heard no one."
"By the time a smoggy and hesitant dawn broke over the offices of the Commissariat of Police of the eighth arrondissement in the rue de Lisbonne, tempers were already frayed. The body of a woman identified as Madame Marguerite Vernier has been discovered shortly after eight o'clock on the evening of Sunday, September 20. The news had been telephoned in from one of the new public booths on the corner of the rue de Berlin and the rue d'Amsterdam by a reporter from Le Petit Journal."
"In the next stack she discovered a first edition of Maistre's Voyage autour de ma chambre. It was battered and dog-eared, unlike Anatole's pristine copy at home. In another alcove she found a collection of both religious and fervently antireligious texts, grouped together as if to cancel one another out. In the section devoted to contemporary French literature, there was a set of Zola's Rougon-Macquart novels, as well as Flaubert, Maupassant and Huysmans --indeed, many of the intellectually improving texts Anatole tried in vain to press upon her, even a first edition of Stendhal's Le rouge et le noir. There were a few works in translation but nothing entirely to her taste except for Baudelaire's translations of Monsieur Poe. Nothing by Madame Radcliffe or Monsieur Le Fanu . . . The first was Dogme et rituel de la haute magie by Éliphaas Lévi. Next to it was a volume titled Traité méthodique de science occulte. On the shelf above, several other writings by Papus, Court de Gébelin, Etteilla and MacGregor Mathers. She had never read such authors but knew they were occultist writers and considered subversive. Their names appeared regularly in the columns of newspapers and periodicals."
At first, I found myself rolling my eyes at every French phrase and name-drop, but since that started to become a driving hazard, I just quit listening. I would much rather read a story whose purpose is to entertain me, not to enlighten or impress me. Sadly, Sepulchre did none of these things. --FanLit.net
Rating:  -
The story of two lives that are intertwined:
Leonie Vernier is a Parisian teenager who travels with her brother to a country house in the French Pyrenees in 1891. She does not realize that her brother and her aunt share a secret and that her brother is on the run for a man so evil that nobody dares to stand up against him.
Meredith Martin is an American who writes a biography of Claude Debussy. Her trip to Eurote brings her to the French Pyrenees where she hopes to find an answer to questions about her family.
Crucial roles in the book are played by a set of Tarot cards, a ruined Visigoth sepulchre and unconditional love.
Even though the book gives a nice description of upper-class French day-to-day live at the end of the 19th century and makes fun of the stories in the Da Vinci code and some other books that all hype up the region of Carcasonne for hidden treasures and connections to biblical figures, there is a lot of supernatural mumbo-jumbo in this book. It was an anjoyable book for a holiday, but not one that I will remember for a long time.
Rating:  -
I looked forward to this 2nd novel from Kate Mosse (sort of, she has 2 other books that are no longer in print, apparently from another life) having read and enjoyed Labyrinth, her first effort. Reviews from other reader gave me pause, but I finally deciced I wanted to read this after I saw that one of the main characters was writing a biography of Claude Debussy, my favorite composer. Concerns of the French spoken in the book didn't give me cause for concern after 4 torturous years of the language in high school which was enough to help me through this novel.
The book is set up much like here first effort with connections between a present day "heroine" and one of an earlier time. The story folds out, bouncing between present day and turn-of-the-century southern France, in the Languedoc (literally, "language of Oc" which was what was spoken there hundreds of years before). The characters, despite other reviewers beliefs, were, in my opinion, quite well written. I, again personally, found the characters of the past to be more interesting than those of the present.
The characters are tied by a secret that revolves around the ancient "art" of tarot. I don't personally believe in tarot or astrology or things of the sort, but that didn't stop me from enjoying the book in the slightest. If anything, my lack of knowledge on the subject made it all the more interesting.
I have seen comparisons to Mosse's first novel, though I failed to see anything too redundant in this novel; past and present heroines aside.
It is hard to write a review of this book with any detail without spoiling the story so I shall not give my usual summary so as to leave the mystery there when, should you decide, you do read. All I will say is that the book is thick with suspense, bouncing forward or back at just the right moment so that you remain frustrated at the moment that you must wait to return to the applicable characters or timeframe.
Mosse has a gift, in my humble opinion, obviously not shared by other reviewers, for writing characters with substance. I felt a pang of sadness as I read the last page because I had grown to know the characters and I liked, or hated, them very much.
I eagerly await Kate Mosse's next novel as these first 2 have firmly placed her as a writer of mystery tinged with historical fiction.
And, the Claude Debussy information, surprising though perhaps it should not have been so, was detailed and accurate. There was some creative license taken as Achille-Claude Debussy did play in to the novel, but his person and his music remain untarnished by the tale.
My biggest regret from this book is that I don't play the piano. A piece from the book, written especially for the book, and which plays in to the story is left to be read at the end of the book; how I wish I could play the tune and hear it's haunting permeations. Alas, perhaps I shall find someone who can play it for me.
Enjoy!!!
Rating:  -
I finshed this book but only because once I start something I have to see it to the end. Save yourself a waste of time, its tedious, the characters are 1 dimensional, and the plot, switching between century's is tedious in the extreme. I am glad to have got to the end.
Rating: -
I'm a bit uncertain how to rate this book (three of four stars? I still don't know). I was a bit surprised to find that I kind of love it, but on the other hand, I can see many things that could be better. One of them being the length. Now, I love nothing better than a good, long book, but Sepulchre, with its 700+ pages, could (and should, in my mind) have been a lot shorter. One problem here is how Mosse has to describe everything in detail: what the characters have for breakfast, how they dress, what kind of wallpaper the room has, and so on. It's her style, I guess (haven't read anything else from her), but I ended up just skimming through many pages, and didn't really feel like I'd lost anything.
Another thing is her use of adjectives... could do with less. (This goes with the obsession to describe, I guess.) And the adjectives tended to be a bit... hmm, well, let's just say that things were alabaster, emerald and ebony, not white, green or black. And overall the style was quite... like this: "her copper curls hanged all the way down her back like a skein of silk..." (Or then her alabaster cheeks flushed or her emerald eyes shone... well, who cares. I liked this character, Léonie, nevertheless.)
One minor thing that annoyed me a little was the constant use of French. The characters (most of them, anyway) are French, and every now and then something they say is, for whatever reason, written in French. Trying to make it feel more authentic or something? I dunno. The French sentences weren't that hard nor too central ("Alors, on y va," "Dix minutes d'ârret," "qu'est-ce qui s'est passé ici?") and I know a little bit of French so that I understood most of it, but I know how much it bugs me when the author uses a language I don't understand, even if it's something totally unimportant.
Trying to get to the point... the story itself. I found it pretty good, overall. (There are summaries available everywhere, so I won't get into that...) As another reviewer pointed out, the story attempts to be a bit of everything (from romance to coming-to-age story to supernatural thriller), and in the end I've got to say that it does succeed in that quite well. Plotwise there isn't really anything for me to complain about. It's just the way it all is delivered.... I did get the impression that there is a great deal of research behind the book, though.
Maybe the story didn't quite manage to avoid being somewhat cliche every now and then, but it was entertaining enough that I didn't quite care about that. I just wish the author and the editor would have worked a bit more on it - it could have been even better. But check the beginning - if you think you can deal with the style, by all means, do try it.
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