Free reviews of free books 3: The Black Tower (Louis Bayard) and City of Thieves (David Benioff)

The Black Tower by Louis Bayard

I think that I like historical fiction, but maybe I really don’t. There are a number of things that are almost inevitably true in historical fiction that drive me absolutely up the wall:

• There’s always a character (often the protagonist) who is wise beyond his time period
• Someone famous wanders through the plot, no matter how improbably
• No one really sounds like they’re actually from the period in which they’re living

The Black Tower is about an amazingly prescient proto-detective and his amazingly prescient doctor sidekick who uncover a plot to kill Louis XVII of France, who had been presumed to have died in prison during the Revolution. I enjoyed it in a goofy way for awhile before it totally went off the rails.

One of the reasons I liked The 19th Wife was that the author took pains to make the first-person historical narrative feel like it was contemporary to the period. Having a real contemporary account to base it on certainly must’ve helped. I can’t say the same for Bayard, but if you’re on vacation and have a thing for French history (and no hangups on historical accuracy), you might enjoy it.

City of Thieves by David Benioff

I just now skimmed through some reviews in the mainstream press and most of them
begin like this one in the New York Times: “I want to hate David Benioff. He’s annoyingly handsome.”

I thought this historical fiction novel was great.

The writing is bleakly funny and totally appropriate for a story about a starving city full of cannibals. While I don’t know anything at all about Russia or Russians, I believed that the characters might have existed and might’ve talked like that. The level of detail — real or imagined — felt perfect. Nobody famous blunders into the story; presumably Stalin had already purged them.

I had only one complaint, also mentioned by several reviewers, about the ending being too pat, but it’s forgivable. Highly recommended.

I’m not sure what it says about my state of mind or the global economy but I immediately followed this with The Road by Cormac MacCarthy, which I bought on my Kindle. This was my honeymoon vacation reading.

(NPR has excerpted the first chapter of City of Thieves, although this part is literally like none other in the book, as the entire remainder of the story is told in the past.)