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Title: Fascinating Story Marred by Poor Editing (3 1/2 stars)
Review: It took several months for my copy of "Housecarl" to arrive, and my anticipation was keen. The story itself is riveting, with overwhelming historical significance. How different would our world be, had the Norman invasion met a Saxon army that was rested and up to strength? We know the outcome, so the suspense must derive from our concern for individual characters. This is the novel's strength and weakness: intriguing portraits of the doomed Harold and an admirable hero, the housecarl Ranulf, are diminished by sideplots involving characters that seemed either too modern or entirely irrelevant.While I enjoyed the book, Housecarl would have benefited from better editing, not to mention decent proofreading and typesetting. There was hardly a page that didn't contain a typo, missing indentation or line space, or some grammatical glitch. Mr. Brown deserves a better publisher next time around.
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