Average Reviews:
(More customer reviews)I was delighted when I received an Advanced Readers Copy of "The Jewel Trader of Pegu" by Jefferey Hantover to review. Everything about the description of this book enchanted me. It looked like it would be a tantalizing and sensuous mix of literary delights: an adventure story set in the 16th century Burmese Kingdom of Pegu, a tender romance with ancient multiracial and multireligious overtones, a thinking-reader's tale rife with thematic undercurrents, and a work of dreamy and lyrical prose.
I finished the novel easily in one day. The experience was pleasant enough, but the book left me feeling sorely disappointed. It wasn't the ending that disappointed. Rather, it was the insubstantial literary weight of the entire work. I wanted to like this work. There was great promise, on multiple levels, but none of the parts measured up. The novel left me feeling empty.
Typically, I write a review within a day or two after finishing a book. But I didn't for this book. Instead, I kept waiting. I let almost a week go by hoping time might provide further insight that I could use to appreciate this book in a better light. But the more time passed, the more I found myself finding even greater fault with this work.
On the good side, the author succeeded in giving me an intriguing glimpse of two separate late-16th-century worlds: the Jewish Ghetto of Venice, and the Southeast-Asian Kingdom of Pegu. But even here, I felt cheated. I wanted much more detail. Historical fiction typically takes its readers deep into the culture, politics, economy, technology, and customs of a new world. This book merely gave an overall feeling for the times. That might have been all right, if the novel had delivered convincing deeply wrought main characters. But here, too, I felt let down. For me, none of the characters came to life. They weren't flat. They were just not real three-dimensional human beings. Frankly, the main characters, Abraham and Mya, were nothing more than flimsy fantasy--too perfect to be real.
The inspiration for the story evidently came from a single sentence in an unnamed Southeast Asian history book: "In Pegu and other ports of Burma and Siam, foreign traders were asked to initiate brides." From this one source, the author builds the entire scaffolding for his novel. But I found his framework to be little more than a house of cards. I was completely unable to buy into the author's fantasy of what this sentence might suggest. The more I thought about it, the more upset it made me. How dare the author create a fictional history on so little evidence? To me this idea seemed little more than a late-night sailor's tale that somehow made its way into some obscure history tome. But perhaps more important, is how poorly the author succeeds in making us believe these rituals: the deflowering of ancient merchant-class Burmese brides by foreign traders in order to bring their families good luck. Nonsense!
The novel did have one significant redeeming quality: the prose was fresh, reflective, and at times delightfully lyrical.
In the end, this novel was nothing more than a light sensual soft-core romance-- uncommon in its unusual ancient multicultural setting, but nonetheless very forgettable.
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The Jewel Trader of Pegu: A Novel (P.S.)
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