Drawy82 Female. Manchester, United Kingdom

I read about a third of the book before deciding to stop. It took me a month to get there. I'm afraid I couldn't get into the plot, nor I was interested in doing it. My feeling is that the story is too messily introduced and there are too many names to remember. Also, the way characters are introduced to the reader doesn't help to keep track of their personal affairs. Actually, now that I think about it I didn't give a monkey to any of them. I was not interested in what happened and why the death of a member of the Council was so important to those people.

Problems start when Barry Fairbrother, head of the Parish Council of Pagford, suddenly dies leaving a vacant seat that more than one are willing to get. Fairbrother's death provokes an internal war among the other members of the Council and among their relatives and friends willing to support them in this fight to occupy the highest position in their small community.
In addition to that we are presented the lives and sins of every person involved in this internal war. That's where the issue starts, in my opinion. I couldn't follow the story anymore. I had to make a great effort to remind who the author was talking of every time she went back to a character we had seen last time maybe a dozen pages before.
Messy, messy, messy. According to the reviews I found on the Web, I'm not the only one thinking that it's quite difficult to remind who is talking about what and why.

I knew this would be a completely different book from HP saga - of course! - but at least I expected to find the same passion JKR used to put in her characters, making them look incredibly real and passionate and... well, living despite being fictional. Characters in this book are instead flat, dull, even meaningless sometimes. The only one I cared a little of was Krystal Weedon: a slighlty real-looking character in a world of meaningless characters.
That's what made me abandon this book. No feelings, no emotions, no passion. A sense of emptiness all along. A flat story. I told you, I couldn't get into it and I kept wandering around, paying neither the slightest bit of attention to the book.

I didn't care of what reviews said the day I decided to start reading this book, honestly. I actually didn't know what to expect from it. Still, of all I would expect from that reading, disappointment was at the bottom of the list.
I don't know if one day I'll pick it up again and finish it. Honestly, I'm not that sure I ever will.

This is the first book I read from Joanne Harris and I must confess I didn't like it at all. I didn't manage to get to the last page, I gave up after reading just a half of it. The story is quite empty, characters are pretty flat weirdos. I wasn't interested at all in what was happening and in what's hidden beyond Juliette's escape. It took me months to get to Part II and I didn't even reach Part III. Maybe one day I'll finish it, but that day is not soon to come.

The story is more than empty: it doesn't exist at all. And it's piteous the way it tries (quite desperately, honestly) to convince you to love characters for which you feel but indifference. Dialogues are frequently senseless, cut.
Everything relies on coincidences and at one point you focus that the story is "pushed" (not to say kicked) to go ahead taking advantage of them. Continuously. Still, those very coincidences are so unlikely that they just unnerve the reader.
I gave up at chapter 25. Slightly more than half book then. Half book and nothing happened, nothing at all. Those stargazing reports are boring, long and of no help to the plot. Jude tries in any way possible to force us to like Esther as she does, but really there's nothing interesting in either of them.

Probably this book is just not of my kind.

I have decided to abandon this book after having read just a third of its pages. Why? Because I was bored of reading about others' stories, about intrigues and scandals that involved the Duchess just incidentally. Too much gossip on her entourage, few interesting things about her life. Sometimes descriptions about the political situation of that period and about people involved in it take so many pages that you risk to forget about who's the main subject of the book.
Historically reliable, but too, too disorganized.