Instruct: Classify Amazon reviews into positive or negative sentiment
Query: I really wanted to like this book, but . . .

Some of the writing is beautifully evocative: of time and place, of the details of the settings -- even the weather when incidents take place. But the characters, every single one of them, are really just character types, caricatures; they never seemed like real people, and consequently it was impossible to care very much about what happens to them. Rather than a hard-to-put-down read, it was a hard-to-pick-up one.