Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I was excited to finally start reading this book and had been looking forward to it for months. I had heard so much about it, all good, and skimmed some of the reviews here. Maybe I should have read more of them. The book started off beautifully....a brutal, well-told beginning to what I had hoped would be a broad, well written tale of Tudor England. After the first chapter, I had to keep jumping back to figure out who said what. I had to keep re-reading paragraphs and pages to figure out what on earth the author was trying to convey. It got so confusing to follow the story that I kept nodding off to sleep. And the story wasn't even interesting.....well, Hilary Mantels version wasn't, anyway. It was dry, boring and muddled. How on earth this book won a major literary award is beyond my scope of comprehension. It's not well written; the entire story is very poorly constructed, difficult to follow and extremely confusing. While I understand that "literary types" pat themselves and each other on the back for creatively breaking rules, Hilary Mantel appears to not know what the rules of good storytelling were in the first place.