meowmeow Chapel Hill, NC, USA

Indeed I had a moral lesson learned in addition to the entertainment I enjoyed through reading the book. The concept of moral proximity is enlightening and inspiring. Trying your best to be decent to whomever come across your path and not to fidget over not being able to make the world visibly better: how assuring! I believe there is something similar mentioned in the 4th or 5th book of the NO.1 Lady's Detective Agency series.

I like the downplay of the futuristic scenes and the clinical explanation for human time traveling, making the plot more realistic altogether. An anomaly of all the time traveling books I have read. The theme tone of the book, I think, is love and the inevitable sorrow intertwined with love. The ingenious writing reminds me one of my favorite movies "eternal sunshine of the spotless mind".

Dinstinct in the writing styles which are beautiful on their own rights and being 150 years apart in the backdrop settings, the rule of four and the Dante club bear a lot of common themes: mysterious literary legacies from Renaissance Florence created by men both condemned by their contemporaries, which were left to be deciphered by 4 close scholarly friends, prestigious Ivy League institutions, and even the secret underground tunnels which hold the key to shed the light on the dark mysteries. Intriguing parallel, isn't it?

One of the protagonists, Holmes, usually self-centered and self-congratulating, is vividly portrayed that through his striving journey, Dante 's struggles between evil and redemption were rendered in the 19th century New England, which in turn, leaves me ponder upon my own choosing sides when conscience and selfishness clash.

The description of the trauma cast on soldiers retired from horrendous, gory battlefields has never been more opportune for us to lament on given the troubled yet contextually coincident war time we are now witnessing.

A good read indeed.