This was the March book for book club and once again I didn’t quite finish it on time.
The Cloisters
Katy Hays
When Ann Stilwell arrives in New York City, she hopes to spend her summer working as a curatorial associate at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Instead, she finds herself assigned to The Cloisters, a gothic museum and garden renowned for its collection of medieval and Renaissance art.
There she is drawn into a small circle of charismatic but enigmatic researchers, including Patrick Roland, the museum’s mercurial curator who specializes in the history of tarot; Rachel Mondray, Patrick’s beautiful curatorial associate and sometime muse; and Leo Bitburg, the gardener who nurtures the museum’s precious collection of medicinal and poison plants.
Relieved to have left her troubled past in rural Washington behind her, Ann longs for the approbation of her colleagues and peers and is happy to indulge their more outlandish theories, only to find that their fascination with fortune-telling runs deeper than academic obsession. Patrick is determined to prove that ancient divination holds the key to the foretelling of the future. And when Ann stumbles across a breakthrough in the form of a mysterious and previously-believed lost deck of 15th-century Italian tarot cards, she finds herself at the centre of a dangerous game of power, toxic friendship and ambition.
Then there is an unexpected and devastating death, and suddenly everyone becomes a suspect. As the game being played within the Cloisters spirals out of control, Ann must decide if the tarot cards can not only teach her about the past, but also about her future.
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This has been a tough book to rate, I did finish it and I can’t say that I didn’t like it but I have a hard time saying that I enjoyed it too, I was swithering between 2.5 and 3 but decided to round down on this occasion. Even though this was a book club pick I had been interested to get to it because the cover is amazing, the setting sounded fantastic and the inclusion of tarot cards intrigued me.
I love a dark atmospheric book and The Cloisters has a wonderful atmosphere, you can feel the gothic and hallowed institution jump off the page. The problem is It rides on this atmosphere for a lot of the book and I kept waiting for something to happen but it didn’t. The story just seems to go on at a very glacial pace with a hint of some kind of menace or intrigue that never actually appears. Until the very end, of course, where some interesting things are revealed but in such a lacklustre way.
I loved the idea of the tarot and the Renaissance but felt as if it was glossed over for the lives of some very uninteresting people. There were points throughout the book where I wondered if the author was trying to leave a lot open to interpretation because she hadn’t actually fully decided on how to flesh out the characters or if it was actually a style choice, but it, unfortunately, didn’t work for me.
During most of the story, I struggled to understand why Ann was so special and handpicked for the role that she got. She is very keen to be seen as an academic it’s her whole personality but then she starts to act in what I imagine is a really counterintuitive way. For example, keeping a major find from a professor in the field that they are studying, which is later touched upon by the author but so much later in the story that I’m left wondering for a lot of the book why she is making such strange decisions, and even then it felt implausible.
As I said by the end there is a little action and the pace starts to pick up but by that point, I couldn’t feel the benefit of it because I didn’t feel invested in much of the story. I feel like there were too many ideas half touched upon in this book and to be honest I wanted more of the tarot and a rivalry that jumped off the page but it didn’t deliver.
everywhere-and-nowhere.com 