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Review title: Characters with an inner life would help
Product review: I picked up this book because the review on the cover called it the female counterpart to Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose. So much for book covers. A better comparison would be to Eco's Foucault's Pendulum, since both involve vast conspiracy theories and arcane magic. Eco's book works because it's really about people, and about the human fallibilities that make us want to believe such unlikely tales; Neville's characters, on the other hand, are too lifeless to support the implausible plot. Much heavy-handed foreshadowing and historical namedropping. Read Eco instead.
