The Cloisters
Jan. 8th, 2025 02:52 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
alobearThe Cloisters by Katy Hays is basically The Secret History reskinned - and not particularly well.
It follows Ann, a small-town girl from Washington state, who starts a summer job at a small, prestigious New York museum and ends up embroiled in esoteric practices, drug-taking and murder.
I started out quite enjoying it - the setup is good and Ann was fine as a protagonist, but it quickly started to feel very - obvious, somehow. There were also multiple contradictions and inconsistencies that were very annoying and Ann's desperation to please got irritating after a while. All the inter-relationships felt overly melodramatic and didn't really ring true (as well as both main male characters displaying multiple glaring red flags). There was also an awful lot of telling rather than showing, and the author's obviously in-depth research into the history of Tarot was presented directly on the page in lengthy speeches by various characters in a very clunky way.
The story meandered its way through the first half of the book without any real direction or cohesion, only really coming together towards the end.
Ann's character felt inconsistent - her journey from sceptic to believer wasn't held up by the progression of the narrative and she was alternately very naive and inexplicably cool and collected under police scrutiny. A lot of the later information/assumptions about Rachel didn't feel as if they were borne out by her earlier presentation either.
All that said, though - the biggest reveal was definitely well earned and very effective. And despite annoying me throughout, the book was never less than readable. If I stop enjoying a book, I usually give up on it or skim through the later stages just to find out what happened, but I wasn't tempted to do either of those things with this one. The ultimate conclusion did make me glad I persevered, at least to a certain extent and there was enough there to keep me engaged (if irritated) to the end.
It follows Ann, a small-town girl from Washington state, who starts a summer job at a small, prestigious New York museum and ends up embroiled in esoteric practices, drug-taking and murder.
I started out quite enjoying it - the setup is good and Ann was fine as a protagonist, but it quickly started to feel very - obvious, somehow. There were also multiple contradictions and inconsistencies that were very annoying and Ann's desperation to please got irritating after a while. All the inter-relationships felt overly melodramatic and didn't really ring true (as well as both main male characters displaying multiple glaring red flags). There was also an awful lot of telling rather than showing, and the author's obviously in-depth research into the history of Tarot was presented directly on the page in lengthy speeches by various characters in a very clunky way.
The story meandered its way through the first half of the book without any real direction or cohesion, only really coming together towards the end.
Ann's character felt inconsistent - her journey from sceptic to believer wasn't held up by the progression of the narrative and she was alternately very naive and inexplicably cool and collected under police scrutiny. A lot of the later information/assumptions about Rachel didn't feel as if they were borne out by her earlier presentation either.
All that said, though - the biggest reveal was definitely well earned and very effective. And despite annoying me throughout, the book was never less than readable. If I stop enjoying a book, I usually give up on it or skim through the later stages just to find out what happened, but I wasn't tempted to do either of those things with this one. The ultimate conclusion did make me glad I persevered, at least to a certain extent and there was enough there to keep me engaged (if irritated) to the end.
