Having just finished reading Veronica by Nicholas Christopher, I feel as though I’ve awakened from a long troubling dream, or perhaps an opium-induced nap.
I didn’t like the story really, but the writing was compelling enough to keep me reading it to the end. The tale is humorless, cold and depressing. It unfolds like one of those disturbing dreams from which you wake feeling tired. Though I did like the ending, and I think that it’s probably the best part of the book. Mr. Christopher has a nice writing style, and he paints his pictures well. However some of the more surreal sequences suffered from an excess of descriptive narrative and could, in my opinion, have been tightened up a bit.
Anyway, it is worth reading once if you enjoy stories about magicians, mysticism, obsessions and a melancholy variety of love.
