Book Review: Interred with Their Bones

The New York Times called Jennifer Lee Carrell's Interred with Their Bones a "feverishly paced action adventure." Honestly, my only feverish pace was to hurry up and finish it so that I could say "I read it" at book club.

Basically, this book is a hunt for a lost Shakespearean play, coupled with the perennial question: who really wrote Shakespeare's plays? Way too much happened in this novel. I got hung up on the little things, like how do these people afford to fly all around the world? How do they just happen to get flights so quickly? When do they sleep? Why does Kate keep involving innocent people in her quest, knowing they will be murdered? How did Kate go from being a Harvard professor to a director at The Globe in her late 20s? And how can they just leave all these dead bodies around? And has the author actually ever been in a cave? Please. You can't just go crawling around in an unknown cave and stumble upon—oh wait. I don't want to give that away. Actually, I was so perplexed that I don't even know what they found, except more dead bodies.

I know. I'm so trivial, but I have a really hard time becoming involved in a book when I am distracted by such details. Not only were too many things happening that seemed disjointed, but the characters were rather flat and terribly unfeeling. This book is compared a lot to Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code, and I must say I liked the latter much better. I probably shouldn't admit to that, but there you go. 

I guess if you are absolutely enthralled with all things Shakespeare, you might enjoy this for the Shakespearean discussions. But if I hadn't felt compelled to finish this because of book club, I would have thrown it across the floor by page 50. Sadly, I wasted three entire weeks of my reading life on this book—that's how long it took to conquer these 416 tortuous pages.