Citadel

Product Information

The story centres on a small group of women who fight against the Nazi regime and who, by the very fact that they are women, are able to slip unnoticed along the night-time streets of occupied Carcassonne. The uniforms were different in each age, the battle colors under which they marched changing as the centuries marched on.

In fact, she's more than adept at writing two parallel tales with hundreds of years between the two. Loved Labyrinth and Sepulchre, and Citadel blew me away, combining some familiar and loved characters and introducing new generations too. After reading this novel, which I ended up enjoying at the very end, I do not think I will continue to read her novels. I felt that the central story of a group of women resistance fighters, in the Languedoc region of France, during WW2, to be sufficient, in itself, to maintain the reader's interest. I also sincerely hope they film the other two in the trilogy as, especially this book, would make a cracking film.

Like a few others, he disagrees and has accepted the task of taking the Codex to another land and hiding it safely away for a better time. Source: Free advanced reader copy from William Morrow, and France Book Tours, in exchange for a review. Good story, based more in the present than her previous books but still with links to the history of the Languedoc. I had even bought the book myself (rather than boring it from my wonderful school library) and had excitedly saved it for such a moment as this.

I really loved both ‘Labyrinth’ and ‘Sepulchre’, which brought together elements of my favourite genres – history, suspense, romance, with a twist of the supernatural. I made myself finish it as a matter of principle, but really gained absolutely nothing from it except a slow sense of crippling ennui and a desire to stick pins in my own eyes on a regular basis (which I couldn't help but repeatedly roll after each ridiculous cliche that I read). So as 'Citadel' was billed as the third in the series, I thought that having just read a series of fairly weighty literary poetry collections, I would delve into the third Mosse offering. So I was very excited to get Kate Mosse’s new book, ‘Citadel’, which is a lovely, big, thick thwack of a book.

The Indiana Jones films are pastiches of 1930s adventure serials, and Citadel is similarly, if perhaps less knowingly, packed with melodramatic cliche – as characters are repeatedly jolted awake, feel their blood run cold, feel their hearts thudding in their chests and so on. I love how Kate Mosse can transport you back in time and really emmerse you in the French landacape.

I gave the book 4 stars instead of 3 because of the fact that for the vast majority of the story, I had a hard time putting it down. Led by 18 year old Sandrine Vidal, her sister and their friends, these woman show courage and daring, never knowing who is watching them or who will betray them to the authorities.I was amazed by the writing, by the story and how Mosse manages to captivate the reader with her complex plots and engaging characters. Unfortunately, it was probably 200 pages too long and had a couple of side-stories that didn't make a whole lot of sense.