| Sepulchre | 
 enlarge | Author: Kate Mosse
Publisher: Orion
Category: Book
List Price: £7.99
Buy Used: £0.01
You Save: £7.98 (100%)
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Avg. Customer Rating:  95 reviews
Sales Rank: 2039
Media: Paperback
Pages: 784
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.2
Dimensions (in): 7.7 x 5.1 x 2
ISBN: 0752893440
EAN: 9780752893440
ASIN: 0752893440
Publication Date: May 15, 2008
Availability: Usually dispatched within 1-2 business days
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| Customer Reviews:
 Couldn't even finish it. August 3, 2008
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
I'm a wide reader and read from the classics to what his deemed as "trashy reading" however no matter what I am reading I have never been unable to finish a book before.
I loved Labyrinth and it is rated as one of my favourite books so I bought this book eagerly however,I found it impossible to get in to,the americanisms annoyed me,I didn't feel anything for the characters and in general I just disliked the book.It is a shame as its plot is so deceivingly interesting.
A bit too supernatural for my taste August 2, 2008
The story of two lives that are intertwined:
Leonie Vernier is a Parisian teenager who travels with her brother to a country house in the French Pyrenees in 1891. She does not realize that her brother and her aunt share a secret and that her brother is on the run for a man so evil that nobody dares to stand up against him.
Meredith Martin is an American who writes a biography of Claude Debussy. Her trip to Eurote brings her to the French Pyrenees where she hopes to find an answer to questions about her family.
Crucial roles in the book are played by a set of Tarot cards, a ruined Visigoth sepulchre and unconditional love.
Even though the book gives a nice description of upper-class French day-to-day live at the end of the 19th century and makes fun of the stories in the Da Vinci code and some other books that all hype up the region of Carcasonne for hidden treasures and connections to biblical figures, there is a lot of supernatural mumbo-jumbo in this book. It was an anjoyable book for a holiday, but not one that I will remember for a long time.
 don't be put off !! July 31, 2008
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
this was easy a 5 star book i tried to find a little few faults but it was just being picky !! sepulchre was one of them books that takes your imagination to somewhere else the characters were so real and the setting of the de la cade was so good i was gutted to find out it didn't exist ! i miss it already just read it !
"Expository overkill", but still pretty good July 28, 2008
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
I'm a bit uncertain how to rate this book (three of four stars? I still don't know). I was a bit surprised to find that I kind of love it, but on the other hand, I can see many things that could be better. One of them being the length. Now, I love nothing better than a good, long book, but Sepulchre, with its 700+ pages, could (and should, in my mind) have been a lot shorter. One problem here is how Mosse has to describe everything in detail: what the characters have for breakfast, how they dress, what kind of wallpaper the room has, and so on. It's her style, I guess (haven't read anything else from her), but I ended up just skimming through many pages, and didn't really feel like I'd lost anything.
Another thing is her use of adjectives... could do with less. (This goes with the obsession to describe, I guess.) And the adjectives tended to be a bit... hmm, well, let's just say that things were alabaster, emerald and ebony, not white, green or black. And overall the style was quite... like this: "her copper curls hanged all the way down her back like a skein of silk..." (Or then her alabaster cheeks flushed or her emerald eyes shone... well, who cares. I liked this character, Leonie, nevertheless.)
One minor thing that annoyed me a little was the constant use of French. The characters (most of them, anyway) are French, and every now and then something they say is, for whatever reason, written in French. Trying to make it feel more authentic or something? I dunno. The French sentences weren't that hard nor too central ("Alors, on y va," "Dix minutes d'arret," "qu'est-ce qui s'est passe ici?") and I know a little bit of French so that I understood most of it, but I know how much it bugs me when the author uses a language I don't understand, even if it's something totally unimportant.
Trying to get to the point... the story itself. I found it pretty good, overall. (There are summaries available everywhere, so I won't get into that...) As another reviewer pointed out, the story attempts to be a bit of everything (from romance to coming-to-age story to supernatural thriller), and in the end I've got to say that it does succeed in that quite well. Plotwise there isn't really anything for me to complain about. It's just the way it all is delivered.... I did get the impression that there is a great deal of research behind the book, though.
Maybe the story didn't quite manage to avoid being somewhat cliche every now and then, but it was entertaining enough that I didn't quite care about that. I just wish the author and the editor would have worked a bit more on it - it could have been even better. But check the beginning - if you think you can deal with the style, by all means, do try it.
not recommended July 16, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
I enjoyed Labyrinthe for its gripping story and looked forward to reading this one. It was disappointing and actually became a chore to finish. The writing is not crisp and the result is too long; it needed a good editor. Whoever proofread the final version also did a sloppy job.
Mosse has used the technique of duel time periods successfully before, but this time I don't think it worked. The introduction of American English for Meredith's appearance grated and was unnecessary. The characters were not particularly well drawn and suffered from being two dimensional. I found I did not care what happened to any of them.
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