Okay. Keeping this free of spoilers, but I want people with phobias to have a warning before they read this. I am not scared of insects, but I am considering it for the future. I love Kingfisher with all my heart and any book by her is an instabuy without reading the synopsis. But maybe I should have checked this one before.

As I am writing this, there is a spot on my scalp that keeps itching. Not that I have an actual cause to be worried or anything, but still.

Have you ever come across one of those bot fly extraction videos while browsing youtube in the wee hours and watched it with both fascination and disgust? I have. Years ago. This book made remembering those videos 100% more horrible. Just think about bot flies and then really think about how those could be used in horror fiction and you might get an idea about the kind of scary ass shit you will encounter in this book.

I can‘t even describe the amount of uncomfortableness I have felt while reading this novel and I am usually totally fine with anything that contains body horror. But parasitic and necrophagic insects are a hard no from now on (probably, I guarantee nothing because if this author decides to write more like this, I am going to read it anyway and lovingly complain about it here).

I don‘t want to go into the details, but this is just another masterpiece. Your skin will be crawling, you will listen to your cat scratching at the door and remember a chapter from this book and shudder in revulsion, you will look at flies with even more suspicion than before.

Another disappointing story. Maybe I‘ll just stop reading books with a historical spin by him. I loved Pillars of the Earth and World Without End. Honestly, the whole Kingsbridge Trilogy was amazing, as long as it was still a trilogy. The newer additions? Not so much. The Century Trilogy was a masterpiece. But this? Ever since The Evening and the Morning I don’t like the writing so much anymore. It‘s a lot of telling and barely any showing. With this book, I didn’t care about any of the characters at all. They just lack the charm of Prior Philip and Jack or Aliena. Even the villains suck. This whole conflict between the farmers and the herders seemed so boring, I was really thinking about DNFing. Troon made me miss William. He was a proper bad guy to hate. This was supposed to be about the building of Stonehenge, but that really only starts to happen in like the last fourth of the book. The rest is about people stealing land and other people stealing animals or produce and people bartering for goods at the rites multiple times a year and a whole lot of uncomfortable sex scenes. It seemed like there was nothing else to tell so let’s make them fuck, I guess?

I get that people in 2500 BC had very different problems compared to today or 500 years ago. But if this was supposed to be a moving story about how people built this amazing monument in a time without the tools we have today, then Follett failed this assignment. Sadly. I really wish I could say something different.

Ich weiß gar nicht, wie oft ich geweint habe. Aber das geht mir mit ihren Büchern bisher immer so.