Rating: 
Summary: No Pot of Gold
Review: Princes of Ireland: The Dublin Saga is a disappointing, meandering and disjointed attempt to tell the story of Ireland, Dublin and its princes. But the storytelling goes all over Ireland only occasionally returning to Dublin and "Princes" is not the word I would have used for most of the mundane, ignoble characters portrayed.
There are in all fairness some fine moments in the tale and there is a slight touch of magic ever so slightly glimpsed within the pages. But there is no pot of gold at the end of this tome, not-tat-tall.
Rating: 
Summary: So what?
Review: A passable read, but I sptecially did not like the huge gaps in time, and the line of continuity was not clear. It was not hard to identify the descendants of previous characters, but it was hard to identify with these characters.
Rating: 
Summary: Not worth the effort
Review: About 15 years ago I read "Sarum" and after all this time I still think of it as being one of the best books I've ever read. Right up there with "Gone With The Wind" as one of my favorites. As a matter of fact, after lending my copy and never getting it back, I recently bought another copy just to have. "London" and "Russka" were almost as good, and although "The Forest" didn't quite measure up with my expectations, it wasn't a bad read. But "Princes of Ireland" lost me before the first 100 pages. I love history, and was looking forward to reading about Ireland's history, but he has made it so dull it's not worth reading. My biggest complaint is the long, long discriptive passages, and he uses words no one has ever heard of. There is a pronunciation guide in the back of the book, but, really now, who wants to consult a pronunciation guide when engrossed in a book? This is more like a textbook. I hope the sequel is better.
Rating:
Summary: A Dull Saga
Review: And I had such high hopes!! This was one of the most boring books I have ever read. I merely skimmed the last half, reading it for the history it touched upon. I loved Rutherfurd's London, liked The Forest, but dreaded picking up this book day after day. I knew nothing of this period in time, and that's what kept me going. For those interested in historical fiction pertaining to Ireland, read Thomas Flanagan's trilogy. Morgan Llewelyn's 20th C trilogy is also pretty good--not great, but good.
Rating:
Summary: Fans of historical fiction will undoubtedly enjoy this novel
Review: During his lifetime, James Michener gained a reputation for writing Big Novels, epic sagas that spanned hundreds or thousands of years, and almost as many pages. Edward Rutherfurd now seems poised to inherit Michener's reputation for quantity, if not entirely for quality. In previous novels, Rutherfurd has fictionalized the history of rural England, London and Russia. Now, in THE PRINCES OF IRELAND, Rutherfurd turns his eye to the Emerald Isle, in a novel that spans Irish history from 430 BC to the sixteenth century.Much like Michener, Rutherfurd's approach focuses on a particular place over time. In this case, the place is Dublin --- known as Dubh Linn or Dyflin in earlier times --- which grew from an isolated estuary ruled by a lesser king to a powerful port city and center of Irish culture. The epic scope of the novel means that it actually reads like a series of shorter stories, each set in a different time but united loosely by their family history (the book includes a very helpful family tree) and by their ties to this particular place. These stories, centered often on forbidden love between rival families or on vengeance between two families with a blood feud, often take a back seat to the real drama, which is the development of Irish geography, religion and culture over time. Not surprisingly, character development is not the goal here; instead, characters serve as types common to their time rather than as flesh-and-blood individuals. There's the feisty pagan princess who loses her heart to a doomed man, the monk who burns a torch for his childhood sweetheart, the couple driven apart by the rift between Protestants and Catholics. Instead of individual personalities, these characters are primarily combinations of their family's traits (one family are craftspeople, for example, another are scholars). In addition to being products of their own genetic inheritance and of Irish history, these characters sometimes seem to have a surprisingly encyclopedic knowledge of that history. Rutherfurd interjects historical fact into his novel in various ways, and with varying levels of success. Often he introduces a chapter or section with historical evidence, particularly following a narrative gap of dozens or hundreds of years; elsewhere, he merely interrupts the action and introduces historical facts with phrases like "Historians agree that . . ." Least convincingly, Rutherfurd sometimes puts historical background in the words of the characters themselves, occasionally straining the bounds of credibility. Would an illiterate pagan blacksmith really consider at length the historical debate about the construction of sacred burial mounds as he surveyed the landscape? It seems unlikely. Despite its flaws, THE PRINCES OF IRELAND will certainly find its devotees among the countless readers who have a particular interest in Irish history and culture. In addition, its sprawling narrative will draw in fans of historical fiction, who will undoubtedly enjoy the scope and ambition of the novel. For those who are daunted by the heft of this 750-page saga, hold on to your seats --- THE PRINCES OF IRELAND is just part one of a projected two-part Dublin Saga that will narrate the history of Ireland up to the twentieth century. --- Reviewed by Norah Piehl
Rating: 
Summary: Wonderful History
Review: Edward Rutherford brings history to colorful life. This is among his best works.
Rating:
Summary: Benefit of the Doubt
Review: Edward Rutherford has a particular style of writing historical fiction that seems to be completely his: he picks a very specific location and writes a story starting at the dawn of civilization peeking in at the place at important periods as history moves forward. Using family lines and maps and a good helping of historical figures, he works to give you a sense of a place through time. He's done this for Salisbury, England in the novel Sarum and for London in the novel of the same name. Now he's done the same for Dublin in this novel, the first of a proposed two novels on the city. I enjoyed both Sarum and London. There is much about Rutherford's style I like. He writes big novels with a huge cast of characters. He explains things so that you get not only a sense of how the place developed but also how things like language, names and people changed through the centuries. On top of that, he tells a story with enough intrigue and fun to keep you going. However, it may be that Rutherford's gotten a little too comfortable with what he does or I've read too much of him, but the worst of his tendencies are on display here. His need to explain history was more obvious than usual in the opening chapters. Unfortunately, I think the better chapters of this novel are the later ones where the plot of the story seems to come to the fore over history. And, even though he doesn't let any of the main characters get the comeuppance they deserve, at least he sets-up readable intrigues--the best of the novel if you make it 500 pages in. I think I'm most irritated by the immutability of his families from generation to generation. Reading Rutherford, you get the sense that he believes there are "good" families and "bad" families whose nature is passed on as much as hair and eye color which Rutherford puts on prominent display. (In fact, there is even an eye "squint" that gets passed on in this novel.) In his other novels, families didn't seem so entirely unchanging though the threads are there. Perhaps what I'm missing most is the closure of his previous novels. This novel ends in the 16th century. Unlike his previous novels, we have to wait for volume 2 to get up to modern times. Maybe some of the surprises await us there. I just hope enough readers are interested in The Princes of Ireland to bother with volume 2. I like Rutherford enough to give him the benefit of the doubt. I hope other readers do too.
Rating:
Summary: Less is not more
Review: Faced with a long road trip and holding a love of Irish history, I took the CD version of The Princes of Ireland with me. While the reader does a wonderful job with the changing Irish accents, Dublin vs. Leinster, Ulster vs. Munster, educated vs. "regular folk", the abridged version is even harder to follow than some have described the written. Just when you start to get to know a character, they're gone and you've jumped ahead a few hundred years and the ties between the stories are thin.
Rutherfurd follows some of the styles of James Michener in that he takes a geographical place and weaves the people and history in and around it. But it doesn't work here and while I love the sound of the Irish voices, the story leaves me wishing Michener had written about Ireland.
Rating:
Summary: Well, they can't all be winners!
Review: First, I've really enjoyed Edward Rutherford's earlier works: Sarum, London and The Forest. Unfortunately, I found his new book, Princes of Ireland, to be very disappointing. The characters seemed thin and failed to make me truly care about them as in his other books. In previous books, I eagerly looked forward to seeing the connections between generations. Seeing the differences and the similarites that really made it personal as far as demostrating the changing times. Maybe it was that in this book there was no real engaging architectural/structural focal point ie: the Tower or a cathedral to focus on. And for such a lyrical, passionate people such as the Irish, the book was very flat, hanging the plot it seemed more on politics than people. They can't all be winners! Maybe the next book....
Rating:
Summary: worse than publisher's weekly suggests
Review: Having been entertained by Rutherford's THE FOREST, I hoped for a similar page-turning saga in this work about Ireland. Some 350 dreadful pages later, I had to put the book down -- one of the few works in years I haven't been able to finish. Boring, tedious, and not worth the effort.
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