Well after not reading "Freedom", I then just finished this book. I would also have stopped reading this one but then I thought something might be wrong with me but now I'm reading a Louise Penny book and am loving it, thank goodness. This book was so slow that it was really difficult to get through. It definitely picked up half way through but at 300 pages that is not a positive. It takes place out side of London during WWI. A woman just lost her husband in the war and converts her estate to a hospital for men with only severe facial wounds. The plot sounded interesting and the author is well respected. I can not recommend this though as the characters took a long time to develop and when they did it was a superfical portrait. The ending is good but not worth trudging through.

This book sat on my bookshelf for years as a secondhand gift. I finally decided to give it a try, and after finishing, I have mixed emotions. On one hand, the subject matter and time period are insanely interesting, but Shields' writing is so over-saturated with unimportant descriptions, that the story gets lost. I found myself re-reading passages five or six times to try and understand what was happening, and half the time I was confused. There were parts that I loved about the book, mainly the relationship between Dr. McCleary and Brownlow. These two characters were the most well developed, and I completely understood them. The other characters were all over the place with no real motivation. Anna Coleman; sweet one moment, and cold the next, with no explanation. I loathed her by the end of the book. Catherine seemed borderline obsessed with her dead husband, and the way she treats poor Julian completely disgusted me. I had no interest in their relationship, because on one page, Catherine would be enthralled, and on the next, she would shun Julian. I don't think that Jody Shields understood her own characters, because no self-respecting author would toss characters in a story-line so haphazardly. There was no love breathed into this book. It was as if Shields cared only about the time period and medical terms, and nothing else.

I wanted this book to be better, and I kept reading with the hope that Sheilds would give me a well-developed story, but it never happened. The ending was severely disappointing, and again, I really had no idea what had happened because of all the frilly, pretentious descriptions of things that readers don't care about.

(Rating of 2.5 stars) This novel takes place in England after the commencement of WWI and is a historical fiction based on several real people (Anna Coleman and Dr. Kazanjian). Catherine has lost her husband to the war, and is struggling to deal with her loss and the intrusion of turning her estate home into a convalescent hospital for soldiers with serious facial wounds. Two doctors at the hospital, Dr. McCleary, previously retired, but returned to service, and Dr. Kazanjian, work together to try to come up with novel ways to treat these difficult injuries in a time before modern plastic surgery existed. Anna Coleman, a married artist, who is drawn to Dr. Kazanjian, follows him to the estate and works with the team to help with the reconstructions by creating details portraits of the soldiers going through the process. Catherine begins to devolve, seeing her husband everywhere and becomes attracted to one of the soldiers as a substitute for her husband. The story shows some of the horrors of war, not only for those injured but also for those who attempt to treat them. While this was an interesting portrayal, I found it difficult at times to have any empathy for the characters, particularly the two women, but I did gain some historical perspective.

This was a very uneven book. I liked the idea behind the book of a young wealthy widowed woman opening up her stately home to become a hospital in the first world war. There the surgeons do their best to patch up the gravely injured faces of the soldiers from the trenches. However Shields has obviously done a lot of research for this book and seemed determined to use every last shred of it in the novel.

I loved the style of writing and everything about that whole historical era, but the story never really did anything for me.

This book started out well and seemed to have potential. However, characters remained flat, and many potential plot turns were never developed in interesting ways. Most problematic for me, however, was the sense that the prose was overly dramatic, that it was trying too hard to be profound.

Pretty boring novel, expected it to be better. Review in my NOTEBOOK.

I was pulled into this book by the inside jacket----and I had read The Fig Eaters by the same author and loved her writing style, so I gave it a whirl. It really started off as a great story, one filled with the angst of WWI, and how it affected several lives that eventually intertwine. The premise is about a woman that loses her husband in the war----so she uses her mansion to house a special hospital that deals with men that have extreme facial injuries.
She ends up falling for one of the patients, and since this hospital is breaking new horizons and forming masks for the victims, whom are horrifically scarred, she manages to get this patients mask to be made to look like her dead husband.

It all was very intriguing, and I thought that I would learn something of this----as I had never heard of this being done before, but it didn't really answer my questions. The story never developed much past these four or five people that were taking care of the wounded and the detail about how they did the masks, etc. became monotonous. I found myself wanting it to get to some conclusion.

Jody Shields is a beautiful writer-----don't get me wrong----but she wasn't able to satisfy the reader with the movement of the story. It almost felt like someone talking around a point and never getting to it.

Very sad but true what men go through in war

An anti-war novel without preaching. It is the story of those men who have lost parts of their faces in the war before plastic surgery was perfected as a way to help, the doctors who want to heal them, and the wealthy woman whose home they install the hospital. Keeps you guessing, lovely poetic language

Didn't really enjoy this book. There were some interesting characters but for whatever reason I could not get engaged.

This was quite a strange book - spooky, off-kilter
romantic in a wierd way