Citadel

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I failed to be moved by the love story because to me it seemed to have been put together in haste, as if the author suddenly realized she needed to have a romance thrown in. Not only is this sub plot a distraction from the more credible one concerning the female resistance movement, but it simply does not make sense.

While war blazed in the trenches at the front, back at home a different battle is waged, full of clandestine bravery, treachery and secrets. If I had found several spelling mistakes and multiple erroneous attempts at a semi-colon I would not have been surprised. By the end, I just couldn't care less about the characters, but was simply rather glad they had stopped speaking.The Founder Director of the Women’s Prize for Fiction, she is the Founder of the global Woman In History campaign. Labyrinth was concerned with the Albigensian crusade and the destruction of the Cathar heresy in the 13th century, weaving historical truth with the legends of the holy grail that flourished after the final massacre of the Cathars at their fortress of Montségur. I've had this sitting on my library wishlist for ages, not knowing if I should re-read it, as I didn't want to spoil my happy memories of having devoured it the first time round.

War is a horrible thing, and people under normal peaceful circumstances would never think of doing something, that during a time of war they would do otherwise.The Indiana Jones films are pastiches of 1930s adventure serials, and Citadel is similarly, if perhaps less knowingly, packed with melodramatic cliche – as characters are repeatedly jolted awake, feel their blood run cold, feel their hearts thudding in their chests and so on.

There is no sense of discrimination from an industry that is nowadays entirely driven by money rather than literary worth or producing novels that are worthy at least in terms of enjoyment. So I was very excited to get Kate Mosse’s new book, ‘Citadel’, which is a lovely, big, thick thwack of a book. I had not read any other of Kate Mosse's work prior to reading Citadel so I was unsure of what I was getting into. Even though I originally read this book some years ago I still remember thoroughly enjoying this final book in the Labyrinth trilogy.While fiction, this novel is written around real events of the Second World War, and was inspired by the massacre at Baudrigues on August 19, 1944 and the women that died there. The street scenes, countryside, the romantic allure of France, transcended onto the pages of the story. Like their ancestors who fought to protect their land from Northern invaders seven hundred years before, these women—code-named Citadel—fight to liberate their home from the Germans. not only as divine prediction of future events but also as divine diagnosis of the present state of affairs.

Beneath his official guise, Authié is a kind of latter-day inquisitor, obsessed with restoring the purity of the Catholic faith; he knows that Antoine corresponded with Otto Rahn, and suspects that before Rahn's death the German passed to Antoine a map revealing the whereabouts of an ancient codex containing a secret so powerful it could change the course of the war. This idea of a connection between the story of a secret Cathar treasure and the grail was given substance in the 20th century by the work of Otto Rahn, a German historian and SS officer who believed that the Cathars held the key to the grail mystery, and that the evidence was somewhere beneath the ruins of Montségur.So I ask, why is there a book about "sacred words" and Christians, paired with and utilized by an unbelieving French resistance fighter? It's not that Kate Mosse does anything badly in this book, she just doesn't do anything well enough to keep me involved. Yes Audric Baillard features quite heavily throughout, but it really took me until 300 pages to start to thoroughly enjoy the book. Citadel is a huge tome of a book, almost 700 pages and although it dragged a tiny bit in the middle, on the whole, it is a fast-paced, if complex story that will grip the reader.