The Eagle and the Sun Book

Where to begin. This book was... different. First off, I don't know much about Shakespeare (apart from Merchant of Venice, The Tempest, Taming of the shrew and Macbeth, which were 7th grade reading in unabridged form(horror!!!!) ----okay I'm rambling! )


Anyhoo - It seems like the story would be boring from the blurb. It wasn't (although I think it was a good thing I skipped the blurb altogether before reading).

Things I liked:

-Nice place setting, I usually hate the time spent on describing the scenery cuz less time's left for real story but here I could almost almost feel the sunshine - and sunshine in Europe is a great thing (I guess this book was set in UK - I dunno) - also when other things were described, I could feel the atmosphere - of the weather, play, dressing area etc etc - helped to get into the book.

-subtle dialog which could lead the reader to smile

-Not stupid heroine. She did wonder and yearn and all that but her introspection wasn't irritating (I skipped the paras where it got a bit much, but there weren't that many of them)

-a h who knew the score, was independent but, like the rest of womankind, needed a strong man to cuddle.

-one side detail about the OW which the h found truly amusing (as did I) - every time the h referred to the OW with that concept, it put a smile on my face.

-a lovely dog - and dogs provided instant credibility to a book cuz... well - they're animals... :P

-The H said some stuff which told the h why he wouldn't want to be with her and I realised that's true for all of these guardian/ward type relationships

oh and I got to know there's a character called Rosalind in the play called As You Like It (which goes on my TBR pile)




Things which ....could have improved the book further:

-The hero totally looks like a zombie on the cover

-It was going very nicely and at that pace the ending would have required at least 15 more pages. Seems like the HQN limit of 180 pages did the author in -

-more emotion from the H so that we know he's affected (we can sort of see he's affected but I guess he hides it well) - again, that may be a limitation of the no. of pages