The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas | Book Review

★★★★★

Magnificent!

5 Stars | Adult | Fiction | History

​I had already fallen in love with the 2002 movie of the same title, with Jim Caviezel playing the Count, that made me want to read the book. The amount of detail in this book made it magnificent. 

I will admit that I listened to the audiobook because I knew that I would lose something in translation from when this book was written and now but I still made sure that I got the unabridged version so I could read the book as the author initially intended it. This book was almost 53 hours long and worth every single second, especially with Bill Homewood narrating it. He did such an amazing job with the various voices, accents and pronunciations that it made a book of this magnitude even more enjoyable. 

This book was written in a time when stories revolved around the details. When I say detail, I mean DETAIL. 
     -You can visualize almost every aspect of a room with how much information the author provides the reader. However, there were some exceptions like when I didn't know what a specific item was that was being mentioned. 
     -When a new character is brought into the story, the narrator pauses to give a fabulously elaborate description of the character usually consisting of their dress, how they carried themselves, what they did in their day-to-day life, and who they associated with. 

​My favorite part of the author's writing was when the narration stopped telling the story for a second to say something like, 'As most of our readers already know...', 'Since we did not properly introduce this person earlier...' or 'as we have already mentioned this, we won't repeat it...'.  I have never seen this form of narration in any other literary work that I've read and I thoroughly enjoyed it. With the amount of information that the author provides the reader, I thought that I would lose track of most of the characters, having to 'flip back' to previous chapters to remember who they were, surprisingly that wasn't the case. 

​When watching the movie, you can see just how much was removed for the script and the couple things that were swapped around. To be fair though they were, for once, able to keep the essence of the book which I of course loved. There was one instance in the movie that I wished was in the book instead of the way it was originally written and I was truly dashed by the turn of events in the book. 

​I thoroughly enjoyed listening to this book and would highly recommend it for readers who are looking to get lost in a great story when stories were legendary. You honestly can't go wrong with the movie, audiobook, or original text. I recommend all three! 

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