Reviews and Comments

A plot rich with a potentially fascinating subject (the faith of a contemporary British teen in Rome which apparently mirrors that of another teen several centuries earlier in the same city) with undercurrents of sex, incest and murder lets you expect a book with deep and engrossing historical and philosophical observations and speculations.

Personally I was bitterly disappointed, I have to admit. In the novel, Costa, the main character complains of the cheap treatment of the affair by the medias, reducing everything to clichés and dealing mostly with sensationalism. I would extend exactly the same comments to Hewson.

The plot remains at the surface of the similarities between the two girls divided by centuries, nowhere is there even the attempt to deal with the real distress of either one of them. The interactions between all the characters seem to be a copy/paste from a collection of bad novels for teenagers and are all so grotesquely predictable, superficial and shallow that one is left bemused.

I may have enjoyed that novel when I was fifteen (and even then I'm not sure) but that's not the case any more.