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    Odes

    Odes

    Sharon Olds

    (0 Ratings) Rate It

    Book

    "Interspersed with acts of breathtaking linguistic daring." (Charlotte Mendelson, Observer Book of...

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Donna C (199 KP) rated Geiger in Books

Apr 21, 2021  
Geiger
Geiger
Gustaf Skordeman | 2021 | History & Politics, Thriller
6
6.0 (1 Ratings)
Book Rating
Well written (0 more)
Not my kind of story (0 more)
Not for me
When I read the synopsis I was really interested in this book. But when it arrived and I started to read it, it turned out to be different to how I expected.

I got to about halfway through and decided I didn't want to finish it. I didn't really engage with the characters, or the story.

It started off with a 70 year old Swedish woman shooting her 85 year old husband dead after a phone call which just gave the code word Geiger. Then she leaves. That is what grabbed me. But then the story goes into Cold War territory and the relationship between Sweden and East Germany. The husband was a famous children's television personality in his younger days and would hold parties at his home which famous people would attend, including other TV stars, business people and politicians. But was he a spy working for East Germany? Or for Sweden against East Germany? And why is his wife now going around shooting other people connected to him? Is she the spy? I'll never know, as I only got to page 203.

If anyone would like to tell me how it ends, feel free.
  
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David McK (3425 KP) rated The Eagle of the Ninth in Books

Jan 28, 2019  
The Eagle of the Ninth
The Eagle of the Ninth
Rosemary Sutcliff | 2000
6
6.0 (2 Ratings)
Book Rating
So, this is history (and told in the foreword of this novel): Sometime about the year AD 117, the Roman Ninth Legion marched north to deal with an uprising among the Caledonian tribes (in what is now Scotland), and were never heard of again. Also, nearly eighteen hundred years later during excavations at Silchester, a wingless Roman Eagle was dug up, buried under the fields.

But how did it come to be there?

While no-one knows for certain, those 2 facts together form the starting point for this story, which sees the son of the last commander of said Legion traveling North 'beyond the [Hadrians] wall' to search for and return said Eagle after his partial recovery from his laming during an attack on his outpost, and after he hears rumours of an Imperial Eagle in the Celts hands.

He is accompanied on this journey by his freed slave, whom he had previously (before the journey, during his recovery) rescued from the Arena.

While I had previously seen the 2011 film of the same name, I'd actually never read the source material before, so was unable to say how truly it stuck to the same.

Now I have, and I have to say: said movie does stick remarkably close, even if not entirely faithfully. the book, I found, could be a bit slow at times, and also tended to gloss over the less pleasant (shall we say) aspects of Roman society, with the Romans largely portrayed as civilized as compared to the uncouth Barbarians.

But then again, this is -supposedly - a children's book, and also a product of its time (first published, remember, in the 1950s).