Medaljonki

I'm sorry, but this just isn't good.

I wanted to read this book for two reasons.
1) the author has the same last name as I do. Later I found out that it was nom de plum. He just admired the German Nobel prize winner Friedrich Bergius. :-(

2) The premise of the book was fascinating. A young couple was engaged and to celebrate the event they went shopping for some little memento, and found an ancient, Egyptian scarab pendant. And they felt they had seen it before. And it turned out that they had. Their souls had been living many lives before. First in Egypt the man had given the scarab to his love, but their lives didn't turn out well, they died, and were condemned to try again. In Rome during Nero, in Spain during Spanish inquisition, in France during the revolution... and the scarab is there every time.
It's about rebirth and eternal love and soul lessons or something like that.

It could have been amazing.

It wasn't. :-(

Now... he TRIES to stay true to the history he writes about, but I don't think he manages well. Of course, one cannot say how the Egyptian people would have been, because there aren't many novels from Ancient Egypt saved to this day :-D There's more information about the Romans, even more about 16th century Spain and 18th century France, but I don't think C.C. or Egon-Maria Zimmer, as was the author's real name, had the ability to adjust his writing enough to make his characters live in real events. I didn't get attached to the characters and didn't think their choices and actions and thoughts or even the events were believable. At first I “listened” with lukewarm interest, but it cooled very quickly, and the Spain segment of the story froze it. I had to force myself to wade through the France part. And it didn't even end satisfactorily.
You see, the author had made the male lead skeptical about reincarnation, but Christian, so the female lead could tell him “You can't prove God exists, and I can't prove reincarnation is real, same thing”. And the male lead agreed with her. And that's where they dropped it. We won't find out if they manage to live their lives this time according to the “higher expectations” which they failed in previous lives. It doesn't look good. But - I don't like these people. There's only two characters I find in some way interesting, and that was a side character in the Spain story, and then Raimond's character arc was interesting, he seemed to be evolving into a very interesting person.

But - frankly, all I get from this book is that I want to rewrite the story and do it better.