A beach urchin asked me a while back when I was gonna do another book blahg. My reply was “when I finish the Poldark series”. I have finished it and here is my report.

12 long books. 500-800+ pages each on my phone. I tend to prefer a small font size so not sure what that translates to in print or other electronic formats but it was a LOT of writing. I LOVED this series although it had its flaws. I’m not sure I can write about it coherently (see disclaimer at the end) but I’ll try.

I loved the Cornwall setting. It isn’t anything like the moominbeach except for Big Water, a beach, and sunsets. I think I found via Google maps the big beach near the Poldark family home although it seems to have a different name than in the books. I didn’t really have a good idea about where Cornwall *was* before reading the series.

I love long family historical dramas (not sure if that’s an accurate label). I liked most of the characters, even those who were deliberately created to be baddies. There were characters I wanted to know more about. There was a character that I HATED with a passion. Not sure what the author was doing with that story line. For that matter, there were sub-plots that disappeared, some for the better, some I wanted to know more about.

12 books? They were not written in a tight sequence, for instance, I think the fifth book was written 20 years after the fourth. That resulted in a slight change in writing style, for the better IMO. The author slipped in a lot of words I wasn’t sure of, some from the Cornish vocabulary of the era, others English words I didn’t know. I consulted The Google a lot for those, which I enjoyed.

There were long technical explanations about copper/tin mining, which was fine (even though I didn’t always understand them) because mining was the primary business/occupation of most of the characters. I was less enamored with the steam engine stuff, which was supposed to flesh out one of the characters (not the one I hated) but there was too much of it for me. I am not a history buff so the battle descriptions were basically unintelligible to me for the most part. Again, Google maps came to my aid and I am happy to report that I NOW KNOW where Waterloo occurred!

Hero? Ross Poldark, every woman’s hero? (Jamie Fraser, every woman’s hero?) Yes yes yes. A strong leading man who, flawed as he is, VALUES people, even those of lesser “standing”, and isn’t afraid to fight villains and try to put injustices to right. Make no mistake, there are great female characters in this series too. I am kind of joking about the similarities I see between these two guys.

Okay, I finished the last book a few days ago and I have read a couple much shorter books since then (flinging avoidance 🐽). I dunno if it would be everyone’s cuppa but I was blown away by Piranesi. There is NO WAY I can describe this book. Just WOW!

Disclaimer. I was once “invited” by a college English professor to be an English major. I think that was because on a good day I could write a complete sentence and cobble together a decent three-page paper. Those were skills I learned in our not-that-bad schools in the yooperland, the latter from my 12th grade “honors” English teacher. His name rhymed with “fifer” but was spelled “Phifer” and people often misread it and called him Mr. Piffer, which he did not like but was able to joke about.

My point here is that I did NOT major in English and therefore have no credentials or expertise in reviewing books so take this for what it’s worth.

I gotta go for now so typos and things be damned!

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