Jester's Fortune

Locations
Call Number: Fiction
On Shelf At: Downtown Library

Location & Checkout Length	Call Number	Checkout Length	Item Status
Downtown 2nd Floor 4-week checkout	Fiction	4-week checkout	On Shelf

"An Alan Lewrie naval adventure."

COMMUNITY REVIEWS

Just Skip This One submitted by GJBarnett2 on September 4, 2023, 11:48am When I discovered Dewey Lambdin's "Alan Lewrie" series some years ago I went back and read them all in order beginning with "The King's Coat" published in 1989 up through "Much Ado About Lewrie," the 25th, published in 2019. When I learned of Lambdin's 2021 death recently, I set-out to blitz-read the whole series again. The first 7 were good but this one, not so much. In the "Afterward" to one of his earlier books, Lambdin acknowledged having received many complaints about his punctilious attention to accurate detail on the ground, essentially, that he didn't want to be criticized by some "salty sea dog" for carelessness. This installment of the series in particular suffers greatly from excessive detail, could be a text for a graduate degree for commands for ship-handling in the Age Of Sail with great detail about construction, sails and rigging and "points of sail" and although a chart of "points of sail and a 32-point wind rose" and a large scale sketch of a 3-masted full-rigged sailing ship with sails, rigging, etc, were included, there were no maps of the land or maritime geography which figures in to the story in great detail. This one is set in the Adriatic in about 1797 smf there is great complex detail about the independent states of late 18th Century Italy and the Balkans so unless you have great familiarity with The Papal States, Piedmont, Lombardy, Tuscany, Venice, etc and with the lands, religions, and peoples of the Balkans, you'll miss a great deal of the inter-twined plots. Much of this book might as well never have been written because no-one will understand or appreciate it. Add in Lambdin's practice of transcribing foreign accents and this becomes even more of a tedious mess. Just too effort to wade through. If the next in the series, "The King's Captain" isn't any better, I may just quit.