Maybe this just found me at the wrong time, but I got a little more than halfway thorough it before I threw in the towel.

I used to say that I didn’t care for historical fiction. I’ve since read a number of great books that made me change that idea, but this is the kind of book that made me feel that way in the first place.

It was complicated, kind of deliberately obtuse, and rooted in history so concretely that I felt out of the loop from the jump. I’m not familiar with the Tichborne case (or wasn’t, anyway; I read about it thinking that it’d solve my issue), and Smith drops the reader into the midst of conversations between people as they discuss the details of it. It’s almost hostile to the unfamiliar reader – like there was a background brief that I didn’t know about. The timeline shifts without warning, and the short chapters prevented me from settling in.

I kept at it – I was enjoying one of the storylines but every time I felt like I was getting a grip on the story or seeing how the threads were coming together, I’d lose it again, feeling like I’d missed a major detail or two, or else it would head off in a direction that I didn’t have any interest in.

Eventually it felt like a chore to pick up. Maybe in time I’ll give it another go and see what made it such a hit in 2023, but it didn’t work for me at all this time.