Hours of my life I will never get back...

At least it wasn't as bad as the movie/trainwreck Snow White and the Huntsman (I almost just typed "Snotwhite" - wouldn't have been totally wrong)?

So, after an aborted attempt at reading The Apothecary's House by Adrian Mathews on Saturday night, I finally finished all 534 grueling pages of it over Sunday-Monday-Tuesday-Wednesday nights. I think. Now I don't remember when I started it. But I DO remember that every night I'd get into bed and be like "okay, back to the grindstone" and not "yay, back to the wonderful, entrancing story and the finely-limned characters who populate the vivid world in which it's set!" Needless to say, I was not impressed.

Basically, the story is about a young(ish) woman (maybe?) in the Netherlands who works for a group that evaluates claims to artwork stolen by Nazis, and how she gets deeply involved with one painting (and one of its claimees). Then there's also this whole thing where someone's out to get her, and presumably the painting, because of it's freaking mysterious alchemical significance. It's not that any one strand of the story was so terrible or unrealistic, but all together they were way to much. Pick one, Mathews.

The characters were a problem, as well. The two primary supporting characters are probably the best. You get a good sense of who they are, and the author balances their humorous value with more serious sides. The main character, though, is kind of an idiot. While she admits to being something of a b*tch at the end of the book, my issue with her was not that, but that she was totally self-absorbed and really dumb. She wrote people off that she shouldn't have (like the awesome guy she eventually realizes the worth of about 300 pages after you know he's going to be the best thing that ever happened to her), alienated some friends and used others, and constantly got herself into bad situations that she should have seen coming, in most cases, and could have avoided, in virtually all.

I've read other books set in the Netherlands, but it's still unfamiliar enough terrain to me that I think I could have really enjoyed the setting, and the location is very important to the story, but Amsterdam doesn't really come to life here. Also, maybe this is a Dutch thing, or maybe it's some American pc/squeamishness on my part, but I was really, really uncomfortable with the way race was handled/written in the book. At first I thought maybe it was a translation issue, when the main character's friend kept being referred to as "the black girl" over and over again. She has a name, you can use it. Nobody else is referred to as "the white girl/man/etc." But then Mathews started referring repeatedly to another character as "the black." Oh my God. Just call him the Negro and have done with it.

Honestly, even beyond it just making me kind of uncomfortable, it's lazy writing. If the only way you can identify a character is by his or her race, then maybe you need to work a little harder at making him or her memorable. Or even mildly interesting. OR USE HIS OR HER NAME. At one point, when discussing the effect the man had had on another (white) man, Mathews say "the black had stifled him [guy #2]." CAMERON. CAMERON had stifled him. Or "He had stifled X."

Dumb. So glad I'm done with this book. I don't remember ever hearing/thinking about this book, so I'm wondering if I just grabbed it off the shelf at the library because the spine looked cool / the title sounded promising. If that's the case...FAIL.