Will be released at the BookCrossing meet at the Algiers Cafe, Cambridge on tuesday, 11th April 2006.

Picked up at the Meetup, I have Ackroyd's large biography of London on my shelf but haven't tackled it yet. THis might be a shorter intro...

This didn't work for me, either as a novel or a fictionalized account of real events, and I'm not sure which one it was. Okay, I just leafed through and found it is meant to be a work of fiction (but with real life characters). I had a number of problems. The first was that I never really figured out when it took place. I know I should know when Charles Lamb lived and I could sort it out but I would have like a few clues, here and there, in the text. Eventually I found some mention of 200 years after Shakespeare but I never felt settled into any time period. Clearly, the author knows a great deal of historical detail but it doesn't flow easily into the narrative. Secondly were two very brief but quite graphic sex scenes that added absolutely nothing but shock value. They didn't advance the plot or develop any characters and appeared to be dropped in at random. Finally, the whole plot line simply petered out in the last few
chapters. There was some time spent introducing an array of characters but, once the deception of William Ireland became clear, there wasn't much left to do and the author just wrapped up the loose ends as if it were a biography and that was it. I found it all a very unsatisfying read.

RELEASE NOTES:

For Meetup