This certainly couldn’t have been easy to achieve, and could feasibly be considered as near a stroke of genius as possible. That said, the overall writing here was very fluid and enticing, which varied just enough from era to era, making each century feel just a touch different. Admittedly, it was a good thing that I had this book in print version, so that I could refer back to that above-mentioned chart had I read this on my Kindle, I might have been completely lost when Rutherfurd jumped a couple hundred years and back again.

the relatively contemporary connections between various character, but I found this method to be a touch confusing. Now, I realize that there were some very good reasons for his doing this, mostly to highlight historical vs. The problem for me was that for the most part, Rutherfurd did this in a non-chronological manner, and several times I found myself forgetting who was doing what and why. However, the main reason I can’t give this book a full five stars is because I did get confused several times while reading this. The fact that this was sustainable for me, with such an enormous group of characters, was one of the major reasons I enjoyed reading this novel, and couldn’t stop. That’s quite a high compliment from me, the mildly dyslexic reader who often has a hard time keeping large casts of characters straight. How Rutherfurd kept all of these figures straight in writing about them must have been a challenge, but somehow, he was able to make it all feel very easy and coincidental through his story telling, which is quite an accomplishment, in and of itself. Throughout this book, these six families come into various levels of contact with each other, sometimes only in passing, but in other instances the connections become permanent ones – such as through marriage – with just about every other type of connection or contact in between.

They are Le Sourd, de Cygne, Renard, Blanchard, Gascon, and Jacob. If you turn to the page just after the index, you’ll find the timelines for the six fictional families that Rutherfurd follows in this novel over seven centuries.

With this, Edward Rutherfurd has gathered together a small group of families, which he has placed within this backdrop, at various stages ranging from the 1261 all the way through to 1968!Īmbitious is yet another adjective that is appropriate to use for this book. However, it is precisely the word that use be used about this book, seeing as it is not only long (my copy had 832 pages), but it also covers several centuries of the history of this amazing city.

Book Review of “ Paris: The Epic Novel of the City of Lights” by Edward Rutherfurd.Įpic is a word that has been bandied about far too often, and putting it into the subtitle of this novel might seem a bit pretentious.

Paris book edward rutherfurd