7 0f 7 Blogpadozzle: The Splendor Falls

Author--> Rosemary Clement-Moore

Review--> 4/5

Release Date--> September 8^th 2009

Product Description from Amazon.ca

Can love last beyond the grave?

Sylvie Davis is a ballerina who can’t dance. A broken leg ended her career, but Sylvie’s pain runs deeper. What broke her heart was her father’s death, and what’s breaking her spirit is her mother’s remarriage—a union that’s only driven an even deeper wedge into their already tenuous relationship.

Uprooting her from her Manhattan apartment and shipping her to Alabama is her mother’s solution for Sylvie’s unhappiness. Her father’s cousin is restoring a family home in a town rich with her family’s history. And that’s where things start to get shady. As it turns out, her family has a lot more history than Sylvie ever knew. More unnerving, though, are the two guys that she can’t stop thinking about. Shawn Maddox, the resident golden boy, seems to be perfect in every way. But Rhys—a handsome, mysterious foreign guest of her cousin’s—has a hold on her that she doesn’t quite understand.

Then she starts seeing things. Sylvie’s lost nearly everything—is she starting to lose her mind as well?

Review;

So, just to begin if you loved ‘Beautiful Creatures’ you will LOVE this book. And even though I didn’t really like Beautiful Creatures, I really liked The Splendor Falls. There were certain parts, I’m not going to lie, that bored me. So to be fair, I am going to divide this review into a “pro” and “con” section, and maybe I’ll continue doing this for all my reviews. I think people will really appreciate this because I know when I go read other bloggers reviews sometimes I want to read just the good things they liked, and this way you can go directly to that without fear of spoiling the book with other things that may have been said.

Cons;

Personally, I thought this book moved incredibly slow. For example, right from the back of the cover of the book one can guess that Sylvie and Rhys are going to have something. I eagerly awaited this. But hold on, this won’t happen for over 400 pages. The main character, Sylvie, annoyed me a bit at times. However, I liked the fact that she was a competitive ballerina and her struggles with having to retire due to injuries (I can relate to this, I was a competitive Olympic style wrestler for 10 years, I was also a national champion once upon time but had to quite due to repetitive knee injuries among other wrestling related injuries). Also, the history aspect of the book bored me at times, which is a great feat to accomplish as I am a classical history major, but this could also be that I read half of the book quickly and it was a lot of info to absorb in one sitting.

Pros;

Other than the occasional frustration with Sylvie, I loved the characters. You have the typical all American boy; Shawn, the mean girl; Addie, the lovable older gentleman; professor Griffith, and the hot foreign lad; Rhys. Anyone that knows me knows that I have this Achilles heel for anyone guy, young or old, with an accent. It’s the most attractive thing ever on the opposite sex. So naturally I fell for Rhys, hard. I could practically hear the accent; “thanks, love”. Another thing I loved about this book, the location. Rosemary Clement-Moore does an amazing job with setting the scene. It reminded me of something we talk about in classical literature; a locus amoenus. Which is a term for a scene in a book that the author has detailed so specifically one feels the energy transcend the pages. At times it felt like this whole book was one big locus amoenus, I could practically smell the southern cooking.