Tea & Read: Flight of Earls

Title: Flight of Earls

Author: Michael K. Reynolds

Genre: Historical Christian Fiction

Rating: I’d throw it against the wall if it wasn’t on my Kindle (★)

I have a method for selecting the books I read. I read the back cover blurb first and then a few sample pages. I almost never buy a book from the reviews. Sometimes, after I read a book, I look at the reviews to see how my assessment of a book falls with everyone else. For this book, however, I did the reverse. I read the reviews of this book first and decided based on the reviews.

I’m never doing that again.

Blurb:

It’s 1846 in Ireland. When her family’s small farm is struck by famine, Clare Hanley and her younger brother, Seamus, set out across the ocean to the Promised Land of America.

Five years prior, Clare’s older sister Margaret and her Uncle Tomas emigrated in similar fashion and were not to be heard from again. But Clare must face her fears as she lands in the coming-of-age city of New York. There she discovers love, adventure, tragedy, and a terrible secret which threatens to destroy her family and all she believes.

Flight of the Earls is the first book in a historical novel trilogy based on Irish immigration in the 1840s.

This book was so unlike the reviews I read that I initially thought I was reading for the wrong book. First, let me say that the writing (I’m mean grammar and sentence structure) is not terrible. As a matter of fact, there are many passages with incredible imagery. There were times that I could almost smell the scenes being described.

Unfortunately, that’s as far as my admiration of this book went. The plot was slow and disjointed. At times, I felt I was just reading a random bunch of scenes of Clare and Semus’ life.  I found myself not caring about the characters. Since the story started with the potatoes famine, I found myself wondering about that plotline that the rest of the story. I skimmed quite a bit, and sadly, it didn’t appear that I’d missed anything in the story development by doing so.

I guess I’m just going to have to go against the tide of great review with mine.