 | Summaries and Customer Reviews are supplied by Amazon.com SOAP::Data=HASH(0xb2e2c34) Average Customer Rating:  
Jakes is still one of the best, however, this one is not great....
| Customer Rating: | | I am a huge fan of john jakes, and a big fan of newport, but this book just doesn't really take off. some good stuff, but basically flat.... |
Jakes Has Slipped, Again
| Customer Rating: | | I read "Savannah" a few years ago and thought it was a far cry from Jakes' earlier novels, particularly the sagas. But it's great literature compared to "The Gods of Newport." Cardboard characters and ridiculous story lines leading to an equally ridiculous conclusion are just two of the faults in this book. |
Terrible!
| Customer Rating: | I plowed my way through 40 or so pages of this snoozer and gave up. Why does Jakes try to cram 30 years of backstory full of history, scandal, and drama into the first few chapters? If he wanted to write a saga, he should have spread it out over several books and taken his time. As it is, the plot jumps around frequently, making everything feel disjointed and there are so many characters coming and going that it's hard to remember who is who. It doesn't help that they all have the personality of a dead fish (and it's the same fish again and again).
Then there's the corny dialogue, the flat narrative, the utter lack of humor...the whole thing feels very thrown together and made me suspect Jakes is hoping this one will coast on the success of his earlier works. |
The Gods of Newport
| Customer Rating: | | A great book--typical of John Jakes historical novels. Learned a lot about Newport, and its early history. Wish I'd read the book before we visited ther a few years ago--it would have made our visit that much more enjoyable. Looking forward to the next John Jakes book. |
Good but not a Jakes classic
| Customer Rating: | | While Gods of Newport was an improvement over Savannah and Charleston, it did not capture the pathos or character development of the Kent and North South series. Jakes may still be acquiescing to publishers who want "short" versus "well developed" fiction. Alas we are all the worse if this is the case. At least he is still writing and perhaps he will give us one more truly interesting historical novel where the charaters are so well developed that we can consider them friends we can't wait to visit with. |
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