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A review by tessisreading2
Back Bay by William Martin
1.0
I picked this up thinking, for some reason, that I was going to get a family saga along the lines of something by Edward Rutherfurd. This is, instead, a thriller whose action flickers back and forth between various historical periods and "present day" (1970s), and revolves around George Washington's stolen tea set. Most of the energy and oomph seems to be devoted to the 1970s sections, which is unfortunate: the main character is a disillusioned Harvard graduate student who is from an Irish family in South Boston (street cred!), the author seems to have felt compelled to throw in various "cinematic" moments (a random prostitute gets murdered some pages in almost immediately after being introduced, and there are several thankfully brief sex scenes which are not only gratuitous but not actually sexy), and the grad student engages in the kind of aggressive pursuit of the completely and totally uninterested love object that makes me glad the 1970s are long over and also that someone invented pepper spray. (I refuse to call her a love interest because, right up until the sex scene, she is thoroughly and understandably uninterested.) In the historical sections, there's a lot of violence and murder and a freedman (i.e. African-American) who hates white people, talks in dialect, and basically reads like, well, a white dude in 1970s Boston wrote him. It's... kind of uncomfortable, honestly. Anyway, it was clear pretty early on approximately how the book would end, and that is approximately how it ended.
A large part of the problem with this book is simply that it hasn't aged well; the (mild) sexism, racism, and clumsy plotting might not have been so obvious forty years ago. However, it's not the 1970s any longer, so if these are things that make you cringe, you're probably better off not wasting your time. Good points: the characters do spend a lot of time running around 1970's Boston, so if you thrill to read about people parking at Faneuil Hall (no, seriously, there used to be parking spaces right there!), this might just be the book for you.
A large part of the problem with this book is simply that it hasn't aged well; the (mild) sexism, racism, and clumsy plotting might not have been so obvious forty years ago. However, it's not the 1970s any longer, so if these are things that make you cringe, you're probably better off not wasting your time. Good points: the characters do spend a lot of time running around 1970's Boston, so if you thrill to read about people parking at Faneuil Hall (no, seriously, there used to be parking spaces right there!), this might just be the book for you.