Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

This ambitious first novel tells the story of 18-year-old Nella, a young woman of good family whose reduced financial circumstances force her to marry a wealthy merchant, Johannes Brandt, whom she barely knows. The prologue scene takes place at a funeral, described with phrases like: “With the church floor sealed again, the circle dissolves, the dead at bay. The girl, like a stained-glass saint fallen from the church’s window, acknowledges the uninvited hypocrites.” As the main book opens, Nella observes the homes in her new neighborhood for the first time: “Admiring their own symmetry on the water, they are stately and beautiful, jewels set within the city’s pride. Above their rooftops nature is doing her best to keep up, and the clouds in colors of saffron and apricot echo the glorious republic.” If you like these excerpts, then you will probably love the writing in The Miniaturist, which was presumably intended to evoke an earlier time but came across to me as overdone and stilted. What is natural in 19th-century novels seems affected in the 21st century. Nella is drawn as almost unbelievably innocent and naïve, arriving at her new marital home with her beloved parakeet and little else. Nevertheless, she is the most credible of the characters, as most of them are caricatures, many cloaked in an aura of mystery that gets more and more annoying, especially Marin, Nella’s new sister-in-law, who seems straight out of a bad dream by one of the Brontes. The plot had intriguing elements, but many of the mysteries were not really resolved, including the real nature of the title character, the miniaturist. This book’s rights have been sold in 30 countries, so clearly someone liked it; regrettably, I was not among them