Reviews for The Sonnet Lover

The average rating for The Sonnet Lover based on 2 reviews is 3.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2011-10-13 00:00:00 Wally Majors I should get this out of the way at the beginning of the review. This is not a book aimed at a male audience. A disproportionate number of plot points revolve around vaginal bleeding, specifically vaginal bleeding (due to menstruation, loss of virginity, and/or violent intercourse) as interpreted through a fine art, like tapestry-weaving, painting, interior design stonework, or Renaissance poetry. If this scares you away from reading the book, I sympathize. If this had been my first Carol Goodman book, then I likely would have felt too much like an intruder and declined to read any of her other works. As it is, though, I have been a huge Carol Goodman fan for years, and while I did feel like an outsider while reading this book, I was able to view the uncomfortable moments in the context of the larger story, and it turned out to be one of my favorites. Carol Goodman novels have recurring characteristics, and in this novel, she provides some of her best examples of each. For instance, Goodman always creates a beautiful setting with impossibly detailed architecture and art, and in this book she not only gives life to multiple settings in New York City but also an impossibly luxurious Tuscan villa. While Goodman novels tend to be whodunits with obvious answers, in this novel the main character seems almost willful in her refusal to identify The Real Killer who every reader will spot immediately, and the deficiencies in the mystery become rich features of the narrator. Goodman stories always require the heroine to be an expert in some obscure liberal arts subject, and when the protagonist in this case laments her lack of skill at Renaissance bookkeeping, I grinned and underlined the passage. I had a similar response when a character hypothesized something like, "If only we had an expert in art history to show that this recently deceased woman had true taste in her collections, then we could win our lawsuit and stay financially solvent," - it's the kind of justification that Goodman has tried to find in each novel, and this is her most obvious success. For a new Goodman reader, this novel has many strengths on its own. While the murder mystery fails to misdirect, Goodman does let the tension rise slowly and deliberately so that we enjoy the ride to its inevitable conclusion, with some good scares along the way. Shakespeare fans will also enjoy Goodman's suggestions about the character of the Dark Lady in his sonnets, which provide a playful and fascinating context for the gothic mystery of the primary story, along with a charming ending. Again, fair warning: vaginal bleeding. If you can get past that, though, this may be Goodman's best work, and I recommend it.

Review # 2 was written on 2008-02-29 00:00:00 Aman Sidhu This is one of those books I wanted to like a great deal more than I actually did. The premise was very interesting to me: Rose Asher, a lit professor who specializes in Renaissance sonnets, finds herself drawn into a controversy surrounding the discovery of a cache of new work that might have been written by a lover of William Shakespeare. In her quest to discover the truth behind these mysterious poems, she travels to Italy where she has to confront not just the past of her elusive poet, but also unresolved emotions from her own. The primary strength of this book lies in Goodman's ability to capture a sense of place. Her descriptions of the Italian villa where much of the book is set are beautifully drawn, and her integration of the customs of both modern and historical Florence was particularly interesting to me. Unfortunately, these few gems are weighed down by a surprisingly clunky plot. Asher's trip to Italy is inspired by an early twist that relied on so many highly implausible events, it broke the spell of the story early on. I kept going because I enjoyed certain aspects of the writing, but I was disappointed to discover that the plot throughout relies heavily on things like chance eavesdropping and coincidental meetings to move the story forward. In addition, I have never been more aware of an author's manipulation of character actions than in this book. With any first person story, it's always hard to know the true motivation of secondary characters, but in this case, those characters rarely behaved in ways that were consistent with anything other than a formulaic need to move the plot along in a suspenseful fashion. This is Goodman's fifth book, and I've noted other reviewers say it is not as good as her earlier works. Aspects of the writing were appealing enough for me to think I might look for some of her previous books, but I can't really recommend this one.