From My Point of View - Book Review

I just have to tell everyone about this book. Gentlemen and Players by Joanne Harris is one I read right when it came out. It was the first book I read by Harris, I’d thought about reading her for ages because I loved the movie Chocolat with Juliette Binoche, Judi Dench and Johnny Depp. I just didn’t get around to it. Then I was cataloging Gentlemen and Players and thought it sounded interesting too, so I took it home. I adored it! I was about fifty pages in, then one day I was off work and so I just woke up and didn’t get out of bed for anything until it was finished. (I’m a fairly slow reader so it was four in the afternoon before I got up.) It was an amazing story, and very well constructed, about the goings-on at a boys school in England. I thought I knew what was going on, but what a surprise I had at the end. Don’t read any reviews that will hand you a bunch of spoilers, this is a book that you definitely want to experience as something completely new to you. I love surprises at the end of books, and books and movies don’t always offer them, but after I finished this one I found myself turning back to see how I could have missed the truth that was revealed at the end. If you find a clue I missed please tell me, I even asked this of a co-worker who read the book after me. She was completely surprised too. This one gets a lot of stars in my book-on all counts. And if you’re a fan of chess, well, this book is a human chess game!

Elizabeth