Did Not Finish

15% of the way in I decided to cut my losses and call it a day with this book.

Since I didn't finish I'm not going to assign any stars.

I know that I only read 15%, but even with that amount under my belt I can't explain at all what this book was about, who the characters were, or what was going on with the story.

Not sure if my head just wasn't in this one or if something was just "off"

Thank you to NetGalley and Bloomsbury for a galley of this book in exchange for an honest review.

I was disappointed with this book. I liked the dreamy quality it had and I enjoyed the flashbacks - moving between 1920 and 1937. I didn't care about any of the characters, though. Prue was an unlikable child and an unlikable adult. Admittedly, she had a rough go of it, but I didn't feel much sympathy for her plight.

Nothing really happened. There was all this spying going on, but I couldn't figure out what ultimately happened with it. No idea at the end who was good and who was not. I think it was intentionally ambiguous. I did not know much about Jerusalem and the British and I still don't, even though I read this book.

I never understood or cared about the photographer's wife. Or the pilot. Or Ihsan or Khaled. At the end I was like "well, whatever." ( )

I found this novel bland, the characters undeveloped and the plot vague. Just could not get into it. ( )

Mixed emotion - at times I thought, what is the point of this - as the story unravels and moves me back and forth in time; tiny little nuggets of information come to light; drawing me deeper into this tale; at times I am bored like Pru, going thru the motions, then horrified, interested, devasted, shocked. Until, deeply saddened and on the verge of tears for a little girl, now woman who has been taken advantage of and used literally her entire life. An artist, who sculps visions from her past, not knowing the significance. The journey of a mother, learning how to love - wow... at 1st I thought eh..not really interesting just a story..not really my cup of tea.. but actually it was much much more... "the bird of happiness" who gets a whole world of people thru a devastating time in history. To sum it up; a powerful story that left me full of emotion for all of the characters involved. (1 thing that bugs me still, as others may have noted: Why the tilte? - it doesn't really make sense; The Architech's Daughter would make more sense to me!) ( )

The smell & heat of Jerusalem rises off the page. Suzanne Joinson has travelled to, lived in and worked in a number of Middle East countries and this shows in her fiction. Here, she creates a Jerusalem so vivid you can feel it on your skin. This is the story of an eleven year old girl, Prue, as she grows up in 1920s Jerusalem with an absent mother and a father who lets her run wild, and the people she encounters. As a child she observes much, lurking in the shadows at her father’s parties. The political tensions swirl as the country recovers from the Great War and the next is anticipated.
Prue’s father, a city architect, employs a British pilot to overfly the area and provide him with reconnaissance photographs. In Jerusalem, the pilot Willie finds Eleanora, the girl he loved and lost in Britain before the Great War. Now his body bears the burn scars of his war, while she lives in Jerusalem and is married to an Arab photographer. So there are political tensions and romantic tensions, both underpinned by the use of photography to reveal or conceal the truth.
In the second strand of the story, Prue is an adult living in England, a sculptor and mother living in a beach hut at Shoreham. When an unexpected visitor arrives, what happened in Jerusalem is examined in detail. This novel is about truth, manipulation of the truth, and in particular the use of photography in the inter-war world of political influence and manipulation. It is not a spy novel, but it at its core is the rule of the British rule, the agitation of the nationalists, and the general exploitation of people for political ends.
What did Prue see and hear? What did she give her friend Ihsan? What is it that Willie wants when he visits Shoreham? And did everyone use eleven year old Prue for their own ends?
This novel demands patience and I think will reward re-reading, some subtle plot points passed me by and so I never fully bought-into the tension at the end. In places it seemed unnecessarily complicated with perhaps one or two characters too many. In particular, the title suggests the story is about Eleanora, but I wanted to read more about Prue. It is really her story so perhaps the title should be ‘The Architect’s Daughter’.
Read more of my book reviews at http://www.sandradanby.com/book-reviews-a-z/ ( )