|
|
|
By Suzanne Donahue
| Tuesday, August 12, 2014
One of life’s pleasures is to accidentally find a book that
completely engrosses you so much that you are transported to a different time
and place. One of life’s sorrows is finding a book that engrosses you so
completely that you read it too quickly, and before you are ready, POOF—it is
over. Where only yesterday during your morning commute you were standing in
an English manor house puzzling out a sixty-year-old mystery, today you
are on a crowded subway looking at the people across from you and wondering
how you got here.
In Pale Battalions by Robert
Goddard is that kind of book. It starts off slowly; in fact, you might be a
little bored at the beginning. Leonora, a recent widow, travels with her
daughter, Penelope, to the Thiepval Memorial in France, which was built to
commemorate the soldiers who died at the Battle of the Somme. Leonora has come
here in order to share with her daughter the mystery of her birth and the
story of her life
They look up the details of Captain John Hallows,
Leonora’s father, and Penelope realizes that her mother was born a year after
her father fell in battle. Her mother’s illegitimacy is what Penelope
believes she is there to learn, but that is just the tip of a twisted,
compelling, multi-character story that keeps her and the reader guessing till
the end.
More
|
No comments:
Post a Comment