Book Review: The Mirrored World by Debra Dean

Posted by on September 13, 2012. 2 Stars, Fiction, Latest Posts - 9 Comments
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About:
The Mir­rored World by Debra Dean is a fic­tional account of the life of St. Xenia. The novel takes place in St. Peters­burg, Rus­sia dur­ing the 18th Century.

The pub­lisher is giv­ing away one copy of this book— use the Raf­fle­copter form at the end of the post to enter.

  • 256 pages
  • Pub­lisher: Harper
  • Lan­guage: English
  • ISBN-10: 0061231452

Book Review The Mirrored World by Debra Dean

My rat­ing for The Mir­rored World — 2

Buy this book in paper or elec­tronic format

More Books by Debra Dean

Thoughts:
The Mir­rored World by Debra Dean (Face­book) is has an inter­est­ing premise – the life of a Russ­ian saint. This is one of those books where every­thing is won­der­ful, but for me the sum of the parts sim­ply didn’t come together to cre­ate a whole.

The sub­ject is inter­est­ing, the time period fas­ci­nat­ing, the writ­ing is lyri­cal and the novel cer­tainly cap­tures a dreamy state of time and place. How­ever, the book sim­ply failed to cap­ture my interest.

Even though I appre­ci­ated the styling, effort and tal­ent that went into the writ­ing, I found myself hav­ing a dif­fi­cult time read­ing the novel. I never got vested in any of the char­ac­ters, I sim­ply didn’t care about them at all.

The best thing about the book is the way Ms. Dean sets up her scenery, every time I got my nose out of the book I expected to look out the win­dow and see the bleak streets of St. Peters­burg. The hope­less­ness and sad­ness of the res­i­dents res­onates off the pages and into your head.

The real dis­ap­point though was the wasted oppor­tu­nity for an inter­est­ing novel. I don’t feel I learned any­thing about Xenia since the story is told from the point of view of her cousin. The story is there, but we never learn the moti­va­tion behind her actions. Was Xenia crazy? Depressed? Guilty of her life com­pared to the poor rab­bles out­side her door?
We never find out.

Ms. Dean is cer­tainly a won­der­ful writer, she can string words and sen­tences together for a com­pelling nar­ra­tive. Even though this book didn’t work for me, I am look­ing for­ward to read more of her works in the future.

Syn­op­sis:
Xenia was born to a lower nobil­ity class in Rus­sia, she falls in life with a sol­dier and a singer in the Impe­r­ial choir named Andrei. Even though their mar­riage is a happy one, the couple’s life is dif­fi­cult due to the ridicu­lous demands by the court they are serving.

Xenia’s  dread­ful visions come true and she descends into depres­sion and goes through a pro­found trans­for­ma­tion. She starts giv­ing away all her earthly pos­ses­sions until one day she sim­ply disappears.

Buy this book in paper or elec­tronic format

More Books by Debra Dean

Give­away

  • Give­away ends: Sep­tem­ber 20, 2012

  • US/Canada Ship­ping Addresses Only

  • No PO Boxes

  • Win­ners will have 24 hours to write back with their address, oth­er­wise an alter­nate win­ner will be picked

Con­grat­u­la­tions: Name as email

TLC Book Tour for The Mir­rored World by  Debra Dean:

Zohar — Man of la Book
Dis­claimer: I got this book for free from TLC Book Tours
BOOK BLOGGERS — Have you read The Mir­rored World? If so link up your review below:

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