** spoiler alert ** 
 I was really looking forward to this book due to the summary blurb. It is a cover version of Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale. It tells the story of a king whose jealousy results in the banishment of his baby daughter and the death of his beautiful wife. His daughter is found ad brought up on the Bohemian coast, but through a series of extraordinary events, father and daughter, and eventually mother too, are reunited. 
 So the premise seemed great but the execution not so much. My main complaints, the prose seemed dull and unengaging, the language from the Leo, King Leontes, is horribly explicit and crude, as are his actions. The tone throughout the story was very dark with sexual themes along with envy, paranoia and greed thrown in the mix. I mean, he tries to kill his friend by running him down in a car, he rapes his heavily pregnant wife, and there are other things I won't bother to mention.