I've never seen such a fantastic historical story of adventure, excitement and danger turned into a drool, ignorant conversation of love and music. Patchett insults the intellegence of everyone in the book as well as anyone reading. It seems painfully obvious that she spent all her time researching opera so as to include as many music savvy terms as possible, but neglected to do any research on the country and culture that she was writing about.

One of the biggest insults to culture is her comment about the young terrorist's knowing nothing about music in their village. I would like to clear something up to anyone that may actually believe this: Every culture and people group in the world knows and celebrates music. It is a gross ignorance that would allow someone to say otherwise.

Personally, I felt the book was rather xenophobic or heavily slanted against third world cultures.



Colleen (USA: OR) (2008/06/23):
I just finished this book and found it to be very well written, and to have a very poignant ending. I think the difficulty some have with this book is that (and this is true for me, anyway) the reader becomes one of the hostages; I identified with them and this crazy new world that is formed with the terrorists and the hostages, and I too, wanted to believe it could last. If I wanted to get all English-majory I might say this is, in fact, a book that is a commentary on the nature of writer/reader, artist/audience, etc. Those lines can blur. I highly recommend this book!



irene (USA: CA) (2009/03/31):
I liked this book. It conveyed a good message: love and beauty can be found when you least expect it.
It juxtaposed the beauty of opera with a dangerous hostage situation. Very detailed and eloquently written.



Lana (Canada) (2010/01/31):
Excellent Book