Hello friends, happy Wednesday! I hope you’re all doing well. Today I’m going to be posting my review of Robert Harris’s novel Conclave.

Conclave by: Robert Harris: The Pope has died and now a new one needs to be appointed but it’s not as simple as it seems. With many candidates who harbour secrets, the choices get slimmer and slimmer as the voting continues. This turned out to be an interesting novel, but it didn’t start that way. This had a slow start and the reader wasn’t sure if they were going to continue. It took a good hundred pages to really get into the story. The build-up to what has happened and what was going to happen was really dull and felt really uneventful. Once the reader got through the beginning the plot started to pick up. There was a lot of drama, which is what motivated the reader to keep going, but the reader couldn’t help wonder if the author created some of the drama to create conflict with having a black person be in the running for Pope. Then, the final chapters really threw the reader for a loop. The way that the author just out of nowhere created this surprise ending felt like cheap way to end the novel. The reader is slightly curious what the consequences would be to that ending, but at the same time curious as to why the novel ended that way. Trying to add a transgender plot twist to the end to create dramatic effect just didn’t sit right with the reader. Overall, the characters had substance and the reader could grasp each of their characteristics; the plots where intriguing but the conflicts weren’t the greatest.