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Originally Posted by orlok
I'm with issybird in that I quite enjoyed it, accepting all it's many flaws. I certainly didn't hate it like some here seem to. It helped to listen to it, I think, rather than read it myself. I thought that much of the time Dumas was trying for humour or irony, even if it didn't always succeed, and incidents like D'Artagnan selling his horse didn't bother me at all. You give a kid something in the expectation that they will do with it as they will, in my experience.
And I may be alone in being the only one who cheered Milady's death. Yes, she was undoubtedly the best character in the book, and the story only really took off once she appeared, but her murder of the put-upon Constance, so unnecessary, was what did it for me. She richly deserved her fate.
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I didn't hate the book or find it dreadfully hard to read it through to the end. I do agree that Milady was the best character in the book because, exaggerated though it was, we do get a real sense of her as a three-dimensional character, where most of the rest of the cast are two-dimensional, with some not much more than cardboard cut-outs.
Even with its flaws, I certainly don't regret that we chose this book to read. It has been an interesting experience for me to read it at a rather more mature age (ahem!) than I was at my first reading, and to realise how much I skipped over the bad behaviour which I now find so unacceptable.
I think the fact that we have had quite a bit to say about it and enjoyed our discussion is more important than whether we enjoyed the plot or the characters.