Review: The Cabinet Of Curiosities

THE CABINET OF CURIOSITIES

By Paul Dowswell

Amazon prices: 11 GBP (Hardcover)/ 20 USD (Hardcover)

This great book is written by an author whose name I´d never even heard until about two weeks ago, but after finishing it, I was in no doubt about which book to choose for this week´s review.

As this is historical fiction, you might pick it up with the expectation of having most of the entertainment put aside for educational purposes. This opinion, though, is a deeply and completely wrong stereotype, as Paul Dowswell freely demonstrates in this book. With believable characters doing unbelievable things, he takes a fictional, but exciting plot, and dumps it in the middle of a reality where it fits in – and that is, in my opinion, the point of historical fiction.

We start in the middle of things, with no kind of information about our protagonist, Lukas Declercq. Only as we proceed through a seemingly coincidental row of events, we learn about his backstory. But be careful about judging, so to speak, a book from its cover – everything that happens is far from coincidental. The closest I can come to describing this without revealing too much, I think, is to say that everything eventually turns out to be closely related, almost in a 'Love Actually'-style.

However; though this book does have this one similarity with comedy movies, that´s where the likeness stops. There are few jokes in this book, and quite honestly, that´d have been really tastelessly placed between all of Lukas´ fairly serious worries, often regarding as much as life and death (for instance, The Spanish Inquisition is a recurring problem of his - so don´t complain at the lemons life throws at you these days; back then, it was throwing hard concrete bricks).

To specify on my comment before, The Cabinet Of Curiosities might not teach you much about the history as whole, but regardless, you can´t read it without being a bit wiser about the city of Prague in 1598, and more importantly, you might feel encouraged to investigate for yourself. The Cabinet of Curiosities (the actual cabinet, not the book) sounds interesting to me, at least. I might decide later on to read something more informal about it, who knows?

THE CONCLUSION:

Are you the target audience for The Cabinet Of Curiosities?

I can say for sure that I´m not. I´m generally not too interested in historical fiction, regardless of my rather close relationship to it (for everyone´s information, I´m the son of a historical fiction author).
But that, I think, is the very exception that proves the rule. When even someone outside of the target audience likes a book, how can it not be a good book at the most basic meaning of those words?

What are, respectively, the best and worst parts of The Cabinet Of Curiosities?

With its short chapters and interweaving plot, I´m not afraid to call this a pageturner, and I hardly let go of it through the last sixty pages (and I read those in the daytime – usually I only read in the night, but I was more than willing to sacrifice a bit of daytime to read the ending). It is also nice to have a book that I can like and commit myself to without feeling any instant urge to spend money on the rest of the series – and this, being a stand-alone book, fulfills that perfectly.

For me specifically, was The Cabinet Of Curiosities worth buying?

The Cabinet Of Curiosities is not the kind of book I´d initially think I´d like as much as I do, so I wouldn´t have bought it for myself. However, it has certainly been a positive surprise to read it, and now I would regret not having read it.