Book Reviews

Cronicle of A Death Foretold

This book is originally in spanish but I bought and obviouly read the English version because my spanish was not good enough for all the colloquialism (slang). It is based in a Colombian town in the 1950's. It's written by Gabriel García Márquez.

In short it's about two brothers trying to restore the honour of their younger sister by murdering the person who took it.

For me, this is a really long book, and I mean looonng. I've read many books probably bigger and longer than this but it was hard to get into and with all the many different characters and mismatched time line I was easily confused and had to go back a few pages to re-read what I had just read to try and make sense of it.

However towards the end I finally started to get my teeth stuck into it and found it to actually be quite an interesting read that portrays Colombian culture very well.

In addition, after studying the book and looking at it from more angles this book has many more layers and the symbolism has blown me away.
The connections to religion, the different hidden layers to the characters, the motif of violence and blood and the reflection of the events in Gabriel Márquez's own life.

I'll be honest when saying I was only reading this book because I needed to study it at school and if it wasn't for that I would have never finished the book, and get I am now glad that I did read it because it made me sit back and wait because my mind was still trying to comprehend the levels that this book had to offer.

I would say it's more a book for people aged 17 and above with all the crude language and graphic content.

I give this book 4/5 because of the acuraccy in culture and the different layers of the book.

If you managed to finish this book let me know what you thought, if you gave up and never finished then please I urge you to finish it because you will look at it in a whole new light book and if you have any others you want me to review.

Please let me know what other books you want me to review.

I'm currently reading United We Spy by Ally Carter and that will be the next review.