The Music of the Night: A Review

I picked up Music of the Night in a local Goodwill store (I LOVE Goodwill stores, you can get awesome books for a fraction of the price and you can find some real gems there). This is a historical novel, and basically, the story is about a former prostitute who gets caught up in a man's quest for revenge. I read a few reviews online that proclaimed this novel a winner and that it was a fantastic read, I have to beg to differ. It felt like it drug on forever, and Sarah Connolly, the heroine of the book is pretty much treated like crap through the entire book.

To be titled Music of the Night, there really was no music in the night. Maybe fifty pages before the end you fight out that the hero plays the piano, but really there was no music. Go figure.

Sarah finally got her life on track somehow, she wound up going to some school for girls, she had began prostituting at age 13 after being raped in a back ally. At age 16 she starts attending some school for girls (the book never really explains this satisfactorily) and then she gets a pretty nifty job as a companion to an old lady who doesn't make any demands on her.

In walks our Hero. I use that term loosely, trust me. Apparently he had an illegitimate daughter who was living with him (again not explained satisfactorily) and Sebastian Grimsthorpe, the Earl, was a pretty wild guy. He had a party at his house and his 12 year old daughter is raped by a friend, he belives. The villain, Bertrand de Lint laughs it off and denies doing it, but Sebastian is sure he's the culprit and sets out to exact revenge.

And this where the entire story moves from England to Venice. And Sebastian becomes de Lint's pimp and we learn the different vices of the villain. The daughter's tutor said that a woman with a scared face helped the rapist and Sebastian sees Sarah with de Lint's party in Venice and assumes it's her. (Oh another oddity, Sarah has a pock marked face, which she thinks makes her extremely ugly). This is where you start seeing Sebastian play mind games with everyone in the book.

In the end Sarah winds up losing her cushy job with de Lint's mother, almost gets raped AGAIN by de Lint, and winds up Sebastian's mistress.

All in all, Sarah was boring, Sebastian was kinda nutty, and de Lint grossed me out. Not what I was expecting after reading all the reviews online.

You can tell that Lydia is a good writer, she was very descriptive and I could imagine everything happening exactly as she describes, but the characters just sucked!

I'm starting a new book today. Susan Anderson's Early Dawn. I'll let you guys know how this one goes!