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Ahern’s books are either a hit or a miss with me. The Marble Collector was most definitely a miss. If I had to choose one word to describe this novel it would be: dull. Or pointless. Or boring.
The Marble Collector is essentially two stories rolled into one. The first story is that of Fergus Boggs who is an avid and secretive Marble Collector. It is the story of his life that starts in his childhood and proceeds over the decades through his adolescence and adulthood, right into his present old age. The second story is is an extraordinary day in the life of Boggs’ daughter Sabrina. It stars with her throwing a cup at a wall in work, which leads to her being sent home by her boss. Then there’s a delivery of a marble collection that she didn’t know her father even had collected, never mind kept. Sabrina discovers her father’s life long obsession with marbles. |
As Sabrina looks through the marble collection, she notices that the two sets of marbles that are worth the most money are gone. So she sets off on a mission to find the missing marbles and along the way learns more about her emotionally distant father and more about herself.
Both of the main characters were uninteresting and lacked depth. The idea behind the novel was reasonable at best, but the plot was completely flat. The pacing was slow throughout. Description of scenes and characters were sparse, but mostly adequate. Pages and pages of words were wasted, with these pages adding little to the two dimensional characters or plot.
I wanted to like The Marble Collector by Cecelia Ahern. But I have found it difficult to find anything positive to write. The best part of the The Marble Collector was reaching the end of it.
You can buy The Marble Collector by Cecelia Ahern on Amazon and at all good book shops, but I wouldn’t bother. In fact The Marble Collector was bad enough to put me off from pre-ordering any of Ahern’s books in future.
Review soon,
Antony
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