This took a long time for me to listen to. It wasn’t terribly exciting or engaging until near the end. But it was good. Well written, well read, and and a good story if not a great one. The characters were interesting and the setting was different than any I’d read about, but it certainly didn’t have the fire Diamant conjured up in The Red Tent. The pervasive theme throughout the book was people living through or rising above squalor and misery. That being said, it was interesting, and I have a lot of good memories of the book, but I won’t recommend it to anyone and won’t read it again.