I got suckered into trying this by the premise of a haunted production of Hamlet. But ... This book read like a Three Stooges film. There were moronic ghosts. There was idiotic behavior, there were prat falls, there was screaming and running and fainting. There were random acts of violence played for laughs. There was a sword pole vault. I'm a little stunned there were no kilt wardrobe malfunctions, but then I stopped reading around page 60, so anything's possible.
It was evident from constant references that the writer flatters herself that anyone picking up this book will have read whatever others she has written. I didn't know she'd written any, haven't read them - and have no desire to ever do so. This book is an object lesson in how *not* to continue a series: don't assume your reader knows who all the players are. Don't assume your reader knows which are dead and which are not. Don't blurt out the key points to your other books' endings, because that takes away a great deal of the motivation to read them if one hasn't.
Even aside from the above, the characters were unlikeable (I'm expected to accept that the "heroine" will continue to nurse a passion for a moron who has shown himself to be outrageously rude? Welcome to the 21st century...?). They were alternately insecure, smug, or simply annoying, and, in the case of the ghosts, caricatures. (Now that I've mentioned the Stooges, one of the ghosts is, no offence to the human, very like Moe.) The undead were horrendous parodies of characters the writer read about somewhere else, and the living characters... Evidently the ghosts' primary reason for continued existence is to play matchmaker. If these mortals couldn't find mates for themselves, they would do far better to refrain from breeding.
I adore Diana Gabaldon; she created a wonderful, wonderful series - but she has a great deal to answer for in the massive amounts of trash written to grab onto her coattails.
It was evident from constant references that the writer flatters herself that anyone picking up this book will have read whatever others she has written. I didn't know she'd written any, haven't read them - and have no desire to ever do so. This book is an object lesson in how *not* to continue a series: don't assume your reader knows who all the players are. Don't assume your reader knows which are dead and which are not. Don't blurt out the key points to your other books' endings, because that takes away a great deal of the motivation to read them if one hasn't.
Even aside from the above, the characters were unlikeable (I'm expected to accept that the "heroine" will continue to nurse a passion for a moron who has shown himself to be outrageously rude? Welcome to the 21st century...?). They were alternately insecure, smug, or simply annoying, and, in the case of the ghosts, caricatures. (Now that I've mentioned the Stooges, one of the ghosts is, no offence to the human, very like Moe.) The undead were horrendous parodies of characters the writer read about somewhere else, and the living characters... Evidently the ghosts' primary reason for continued existence is to play matchmaker. If these mortals couldn't find mates for themselves, they would do far better to refrain from breeding.
I adore Diana Gabaldon; she created a wonderful, wonderful series - but she has a great deal to answer for in the massive amounts of trash written to grab onto her coattails.
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