This was the first audio-book I had ever listened to in Hebrew.

One one hand, a big round of applause to the Kiryat-Ono Public Library for having a small selection of audiobooks in Hebrew that one can borrow (on CDs). Another round of applause for the reader who was absolutely excellent.

However, I had a lot of trouble with the technical side of it and will not be taking others. My sweet son spent half an hour working on the track numbers because the tracks would not upload in the right order to my Ipod. Then, if I felt like listening to a podcast for a change before going back to the book, the audio reverted itself to the beginning of the track. Since each chapter of the book got its own track, some of the tracks were very long indeed….

Anyway, I liked most of the book. The story has a lot of interesting twists, clever connections and gives historical background. I liked the author’s many references to songs and familiar things from life here.

What bothered me was that for a plot that has so many characters and moves the story forward from different points of view, the author bring in too many additional characters and spends too much time on describing them. In addition, there are too many digressions from the plot itself. I know it all ties together eventually but it bothered me.

I don’t remember saying this before, but I sort of felt that it was a book written for people younger than myself – a lot of “young-angst”.

Overall though, it’s a good book.