Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

My book club chose this book because we were fascinated to learn about this figure from history, and Amazon’s reviews for the lead author’s historic novels are excellent. I enjoy and read all kinds of books and am no literary snob, but the writing in The Personal Librarian—if you care at all about the use of language—is painfully bad. I am no fan of the present tense voice, but unnecessary adjectives are crammed in everywhere, to the extent that you find yourself stopped from smoothly reading because the overdone verbiage is almost comically bad. Words are misused (where on earth was the editor??), for example, using ‘cacophonous’ when ‘cavernous’ was intended, and treating ‘stately’ and ‘drab’ as synonyms. This also causes you to stop reading and scratch your head since the misuse is so confusing. The lead ‘writer’ is an expert in art history, and you can tell: passages of unnatural dialogue about art sound like tweaked paragraphs from art history textbooks instead of like actual, natural conversation. The narrative choices made by the authors are so irritating that these otherwise interesting historical figures are cartoonish and utterly two-dimensional and tawdry. I lost all respect for Mr. Pierpont’s librarian because of all this, which is a shame. I only finished the book because I owed that to the other women in my group, but I would never recommend this to anyone and will not pick up any other books by the lead author. I would prefer an actual biography to this drivel.