The Luminaries

17906835

 

The Luminaries
by Eleanor Catton

Set in 1865-1866 in New Zealand during the gold rush, 13 men try to solve a bunch of local mysteries, involving an opium-addicted whore, a missing prospector, a recently deceased man with a wife that no one knew about and a scarred man that no one likes. This is a long book, but it is necessary to cover all the story taking place between those men and all those other people.

I had no idea New Zealand had a gold rush so that was educational. This book is written like a Victorian-era book with each chapter giving a teaser about what it will be about. It is a bit like Charles Dickens without all the annoying Dickens bits (no unnecessary words!).

It seemed to have a bit of a slow start but once one of the men starts sharing his part of the tale to a newcomer in town, it picks up and doesn’t stop. Hearing people telling their versions of stories and piecing it all together into a much larger story was fun. There was some astrological stuff that didn’t make much sense to me and wasn’t really explained so I skipped over that. I still enjoyed the overall story.

When some of the backstory was pieced together by the men, the story shifts to real time where you learn even more about what happened from the other players. After that, the story wraps up with parts that the men never knew. It was a nice summary of the entire story, even though I still had a few unanswered questions at the end. Did I miss the answers in this 800+ book or were they not answered? Hard to tell.

 

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