the count of monte cristo audiobook abridged

Albert’s character underwent a big development, as did for example Mercedes. Like I said, character development wasn’t one of this book’s strong points, but I felt there were some intriguing and real characters nonetheless. I felt like that process should have begun a lot earlier to be more realistic and impressive. It just happened really quickly after Eduard’s death, and it didn’t feel real to me.

I felt like these themes were developed really well, but the one thing that felt rushed and weird was the redemption story. I like philosophical books, so it really picked up for me when the characters began musing upon death and revenge, justice and providence.

The beginning of the book was entertaining for me, but a bit shallow. (And while Dumas gets a bad rap for bloating his books for money, I, at least, feel that he does it so masterfully that I don’t care one bit!) But the fast, rollicking pace of the story was phenomenal it’s been a long time since I read something so expertly plotted. Which has its negative side as well, because, for me, everything tied up a bit too well, every story we heard was somehow related to ours in an improbable way, and I didn’t necessarily like that. Everything was there for a reason, and there were no loose ends. Almost all the subplots had me hooked, and I felt like no part of the book was unnecessary. The only section that was slow, in my opinion, was the part in Rome. I wanted to know exactly how much of Edmond Dantes was left inside of the Count of Monte Cristo.Ĭharacter development was just generally sacrificed for the sake of an incredibly well-paced plot in this novel.

We needed his plan to go awry earlier on. It was only towards the end of the book that we really saw him beginning to doubt that he was doing the right thing, that he really was an agent of Providence. He was such a wonderful character and could have been developed so much more than he was. I never really knew what the count was up to until following his actions for a considerable amount of time, and the clever, roundabout way that he brought his enemies to ruin was a pleasure to observe.īut like I said, not knowing the details of the plan was sometimes annoying, just like the fact the count was so shrouded in mystery for a great part of the book. Especially in the part with Franz and Albert in Rome, I had no idea what was going on, but it was fun to go with the flow and watch how things slowly unfold. It also added to the mystery, and personally, the way revenge was executed was, for the most part, a surprise – I didn’t feel the story was predictable at all. But it was whimsically fantastical, and over the course of the story I just got used to it. How was he sure she would do it? Did he have a backup plan in case that didn’t work? We were never given many details as to his plan (even though the book is 1200+ pages long), and sometimes that made the whole thing far too contrived and improbably perfect to be real. For example him meeting Madame du Villefort years before and finding out she is interested in chemistry and the like, learning that she wants an inheritance for her son, and just assuming that given the chance, she would poison anyone who stands in her way. Knowing exactly when and how the dapple-greys would go crazy, predicting so impossibly accurately how people react… always. His plan had way too many uncertainties and risks to be executed so flawlessly. I can’t give this book credit for being realistic, because, let’s be honest, the reach and extent of the count’s influence was just ridiculous. While there, he inherits an enormous treasure from a scholarly abbé (oh, and he is taught the entirety of human knowledge), flees the prison and seeks out revenge. So, we all know the basic premise: a promising young man is betrayed by his rivals and locked up in a prison.

The count of monte cristo audiobook abridged