I quit this book at page 60. I tried hanging in there to see if it improved once they actually get out into the jungle/archaeological site/whatever but gave up at "he chucked my chin." The heroine is such a feeb. I struggled get this far. The characters never made sense to me. That's not precisely to say that they're flat; there are real people who don't make sense to me, either. But there are authors who can write characters that don't make sense to me and are still interesting (Eg: Doris Lessing) or even make me more empathetic towards people I don't understand (Eg: Elizabeth Bowen, and this does neither. Maybe it's that Murray just isn't that skilled a writer. I kept kitting lines that made me stop and say "huh?" For instance, when Lola talks about her urge to tell Erik everything about what her mother's doing in Guatemala. Your mother told you to tell NO ONE and you can barely resist telling her rival colleague, who stole her other discovery, who you hardly know, and who is a revolting womanizer? Uh, sure, makes sense. And then when she does tell him (idiot) he offers to go with her to Guatemala and is all, "I don't make this offer to everyone" -- yeah, I would assume the opportunities to offer to help people look for missing mothers in Guatemala didn't come along so often. Why is Lola so overwhelmed by Guatemala, anyway? She's been there before, her dad lives there, her mother travels there... her reaction at the airport is akin to some small-town-middle-American who has never encountered anything "foreign" before.Not buying the made-up historical background with the lady conquistador whose native lover tells her about the secret magic jade, either. Nor that a woman hypothetically in that position of power would write about her sex life in letters that could be potentially intercepted. The whole thing seemed weirdly fetishizing and othering of the "exotic".Maybe it gets better later and there are actual adventures or something.
La contraportada promete muchas aventuras que aún no he encontrado. Lo único que he leído ha sido detalles irrelevantes que llenan páginas y más páginas sin decir nada. Parecía que no acababan de llegar los acontecimientos 'importantes', sobre todo al final del libro. Además, los diálogos entre todos en general y entre Erik y Lola, en particular, me han parecido muy cutres y obvios. El tema del jade da mucho juego para construir una buena historia de aventuras en la selva. En fin, una pérdida de tiempo.
What do You think about The Queen Jade: A Novel (2005)?
This was fun in a "Romancing The Stone", over-the-top way. The main character runs an adventre & fantasy bookshop. She goes running off to Central Mother to look for her mother, an archeologist who has disappeared after Hurricane Mitch while hunting done an artifact that has obcessed her for years. She is accompanied by one of her mother's colleagues, also fascinated by the artifact and soon to be a love interest, and a childhood friend from whom she has been estranged, thanks to her mother. They thrash around in the rain forest trying to avoid a crazy military officer set on revenge, and find the artifact and her mother, using some coded old documents as a guide. Meanwhile, her mother's diary is providing some very interesting personal revelations.
—Deb
