The Red Necklace

I listened to the version read by actor Tom Hiddleston. I think the book itself would have been very boring for me had Hiddleston not read it so brilliantly with different voices and perfect inflection.
If you're not interested in gypsy culture or familiar with events of The French Revolution, it can get a little confusing or uninteresting, but is well written and it seems that Gardner did a fair amount of research while writing. However, because I am both uninterested in gypsy culture and the French Revolution, it dragged a bit for me. Some of the characters seemed out of place or immature as well and no one really gripped me other than Count Kalliovski (but I've always been partial to villains).

This is a story of a gypsy boy and a French aristocrat girl in the French Revolution. He can do magic.
I listened this as an audiobook, for one simple reason. Tom Hiddleston read it. Oh, my... In the beginning it was very distracting, I kept listening just the sound of his voice instead of the story :-D
But, soon the story got so interesting I started listening to it.
There were several sloppy and crude choices Sally made, a bit of Deus Ex Machina etc. but all in all it was a good story.
As always, I can't say anything about the quality of the writing, I'm reading Gloriana at the moment, too, and I wrote to my reading notes “I have noticed that I edit while I read, and get to the core of the text, but if I need to edit a lot, I will get irritated until I get to the point of “look at that bitch eating crackers as if she owned the world”, and NOTHING the book gives me is good enough. I'll end up hating the book AND the author.”
Now, I do this “editing” unconsciously, so I can't say anything about the writing or characters or plot problems etc. I'm not a real editor :-D (And English is my second language, so I don't even have the inborn understanding of language to help me :-D) What I can say is that it didn't disturb me enough to irritate me :-D I liked this story, the characters, and the writer, I'll be looking forward to reading more by this author. Perhaps not the continuation to this series, that scares me a bit, after a couple of catastrophic sequels I've read recently :-D