I felt like this book was perched right at the line between artfully crafted and stilted/affected. I wanted so much to love this book, and I liked things about it, but I couldn't fully connect with it. This was a book with passages of beautiful writing (though the prose is a bit too stuffy in places), some fascinating historical information to impart to the reader, a trio of interesting point of view characters, and an underwhelming plot that felt slow and bizarrely lacking in narrative momentum. The bones of the story are weak despite the strength of other aspects of the writing.