Book Review: "The Cloisters" by Katy Hays

As one of the most anticipated books of its year, it is clear that The Cloisters has bookshops everywhere writing reviews, going at marketing strategies, putting the book on a two-for-one offer so that more people buy it. But without all of this aggressive marketing, would the book have done well at all? Being in the bookish world means basically seeing this book ad nauseam and not wanting to read it because of the fact it was everywhere all the time.

Then, obviously you would relent just to see what everyone's talking about. Maybe, like me, you would wait for the heat to die down before you did and so, you would be frightfully disappointed when you finally picked it up. You would be disappointed to find it is basically a mish-mash of cliché romance, a whiny first-world-problems protagonist alongside some shoddy history and reads like it was written by a five year old. What a disaster of a book it was.

It is about a protagonist named Ann. She is nothing special except for a 'I'm not like other girls' protagonist who is trying to decipher the cliché hard-working girl boss beauty by befriending her. The cliché unfortunately doesn't end there. Enter the nerdy-but-attractive boss man whom everyone knows that academic men are valued far more by their looks than by their actual academics. Patrick is a one-sided character who's only personality trait is apparently being obsessed with tarot cards. From this we also meet the 'also handsome but rugged' cliché that is Leo. All of these characters are equally and extremely insufferable. The protagonist probably the most insufferable and shallow out of all of them.

Let's first deal with the problem of Ann. She clearly has no idea what she is doing and got lucky because she is some rich kid than can afford to go to New York and sub-let for the summer. There is nothing that she can do that anyone in New York cannot and so, her being part of the mix seems really weird and unnecessary. But not just that, the whole story could have taken place without her and thus she makes no difference on the bigger events of the book at all. Rachel could have done what she did without Ann and so, the reader is left questioning what her purpose actually was. I don't know whether the writer is trying to tell me that there is no single person in the whole state of New York that has a "specialism" (and that's using the word sparingly) in Early Renaissance studies - but it sure seems that way.

The next problem is that for anyone over the age of about 14, this book would be intensely boring. For a very long time, there is no atmosphere and nothing happens. I thought I wanted to know why there was wax drippings when there was clearly nobody in the library. When I finally found out why, I genuinely didn't care anymore. The voice of the main character is bland and diluted by inexperience. You expect the main character to be learning, growing and changing but this one simply didn't. She seemed like an outsider whom, to many people who know how this industry works - would likely remain an outsider because of her stupidity. Two dimensional and often dull as dishwater, she had no redeeming or interesting qualities the reader could get stuck into.

The final problem was the writing itself. There's nothing to ponder on. There's nothing clever or deep about this book. It reads like it was written for a 10 year old. There's some description but it didn't bring me into the magical world of divination. In fact, I felt rather empty after reading it. It's like the author thought if she said the phrase 'tarot cards' enough times then the reader would think there was an atmosphere. Instead, The Cloisters feels like a mess of nothingness.

All in all, the book was awful. I am not going to go into the fact that I find it hard to believe that the Met Gallery would pay for all these people to do what is basically no work ever. I'm glad I read it though. I finally got to see what all the fuss was about and yes, it was terrible. But it has taught me to steer clear from broad literary trends and ignore the overhyped novels in favour of something more to my own tastes.