The Book of Esther - Emily Barton

I selected this book to review because it seemed full of things I like - historical fiction, WWII, steampunk, science fiction - and a blurb from the New York Times Book Review said it was "as addicting as a Jewish Game of Thrones" and I am a huge fan of Game of Thrones so that definitely made this book sound like a must read.

Well, after having finished it, unless a Jewish Game of Thrones would be extremely dull, then this book is certainly not anywhere near as addicting as a Jewish Game of Thrones would be. I am not trying to be mean here, but the only word I have to describe this book after reading it is boring. I just found it incredibly dull form beginning to end. And I cut it some slack at the beginning because sometimes books need some time to get things going but even after it was supposed to be exciting it was still boring. I ended up skimming the last few chapters more than reading them because I just wanted to be done with it.

And I'm not saying Emily Barton is a bad writer, she's not. I have no complaints about her writing style. She's just a boring story teller in my opinion. I didn't care for the story and I didn't care for any of the characters. I'm not Jewish and I'm not too educated on the religion, but that part of the story seemed very well researched and written. 

Another problem I had with the story was the lack of explanation. There was simply too much in the book, in my opinion, that begged for explanations that never happened. The random throwing in of words in other languages without really translating them got a little annoying and I needed more explanation about the whole deal with the mechanical horse (like where'd it come from? Why mechanical horses? Why not real ones?) and the whole situation with Amit. It just left you asking more questions than it answered and I didn't like that.

So, overall, I really didn't enjoy this book but I can see why some people would. 

I received this book from Blogging for Books in exchange for this review.