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Isolde (2009)

by Ruth Nestvold(Favorite Author)

3.53 of 5 Votes: 5

ISBN

9089681396 (ISBN13: 9789089681393)

languge

English

genre

Romance

publisher

De Boekerij

series

The Pendragon Chronicles

review 1: I would recommend this book to anyone who's a fan of the Arthurian legend. Nestvold adds interesting psychological dimensions to the well-known Tristan and Isolde legend, and her command of the period history, as well as descriptions of the various battles, are impressive.Nestvold's prose style tends at times to be too breathy, and too repetitive. These are lesser sins than the many typos, which were frequent enough to be irritating. (I deducted one star for this.) With tighter editing, this would be an outstanding book.
review 2: Warning: If you don’t know anything about the legend/myth of Tristan & Isolde, but you still want to read this book and don’t want to know about the legend beforehand, please don’t read my review. It’s quite difficult to revie... morew this book without spoiling the legend.I LOVE the legend of Tristan & Isolde, it’s one of my favourite classic ancient stories. I read a children’s book about it when I was younger and I really like the movie (with James Franco) they made about it. So I was really looking forward to reading this book. The back says this book tells you the story in the perspective of Isolde, which is, according to the blurb on the back, quite uncommon.The first 50 to 100 pages of this book dragged on so long. There is way too much information to process in the beginning of a book. So many names, so many places, and they’re all uncommon names which are very difficult to remember. Also Isoldes mother was also called Isolde, which made it very confusing, as in the beginning the point of view alternated between the two Isoldes. That made it very hard to get through.After the first 100 or so pages, the point of view changed to Tristan, which I didn’t expect, because it was described as Isoldes take on the legend. This is where the book picked up for me, as I liked reading in his perspective a bit more and also because Tristan and Isolde finally meet. After that the point of views alternated between Tristan, Isolde, Brangwyn (Isolde’s niece) and Kurvenal (Tristan’s best friend) for the rest of the book.For the most part I liked the story after the first 150ish pages, but sometimes it went a bit too much in circles. Of course the author had to incorporate the difficult affaire between Tristan and Isolde. But there was a time in the book were it was just about the same part over and over again: they start their love affaire, something happens, one of them decides they should not see each other anymore, they suffer from it, they meet again and they restart the love affaire etc.This book contains quite a big amount of very graphic sex-scenes and some rape too. If you’re not comfortable reading about that, then this book is not for you. It’s an adult novel, so... I also thought that she missed some opportunities to pick up the story and make it interesting again. She dwelled a bit too long on some battles and some wars, in my opinion. After a while I started skimming through the battles.The author can write a good love story. It was captivating for the most part (apart from the first 100 pages. God, those were boring). But other than the love story, I didn’t really care for the rest of it. The different wars didn’t grab my attention as they usually do with high fantasy novels. One thing I should mention which annoyed me was the poems in the beginning of each chapter. Although they were pretty and I’m sure they were relevant, I couldn’t see them as anything else than just page-fillers and after a while I just didn’t pay attention to them anymore. Did not like that, at all.And the ending was too long. The author could have made the ending way shorter and less complicated.Overall, this book is not particularly good , but it wasn’t the worst either. I give this 2 stars out of 5. less

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