Zorro by Isabel AllendeMy rating: 3 of 5 stars
I was disappointed. I thought this would be a cool retelling of an old adventure story, maybe with some added realism. I thought it would have swashbuckling action. Barely. Almost didn't. Lots of it was a slog, tbh.
I nearly DNF'ed a dozen times. In the end--well, it's okay. Probably 2-2.5 stars if I'm feeling less generous, but 3 on a good day. It's not Zorro, though.
The main problem I had with the book was that Zorro was not awesome. You want him to do amazing things? Well, wait. He's a baby. Then a kid. Then a teenager, for a long time. We get his whole biography, and he's a bit of a mess. The devil-may-care, in control, confident, capable hero doesn't arrive until about 30 pages from the end. Well, he's pretty confident early on, probably overconfident, but he doesn't feel remotely heroic until the end when he's finally doing the stuff from the movies and the TV show. Even there, though, he feels like an imposter, like he's just putting on the costume and doing his best impression of a hero.
We didn't need his whole biography, giving multiple chapters to every stage of his life, especially since he doesn't seem very special for most of this. He's just a kid; coulda been anybody. His legend is diminished by showing him so often powerless, overwhelmed, frustrated. Then his actual adventures are only briefly referenced in the yada yada yada of the epilogue.
Not fun.
And the cheeky, intrusive narrator is not my preference.
I'm gonna read the original pulp novel now. It's been sitting there while I stretched the reading of this out to ridiculous lengths. I'm sure it's full of historical inaccuracies, and probably some problematic attitudes, but if it isn't a good deal more fun I'll be shocked.
Either way, I'll let ya know...
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