The Phantom of the Opera by Gaston Leroux and Alexander Teixeira de Mattos

**strong text**Christine is brought up by her itinerant musician father, whose death she mourns endlessly. She achieves a singing position in the Paris Opera line, where a mysterious voice teaches her to unleash her musical potential. The voice belongs to Erik, a deformed musical genius who lives in the opera house. As Christine's singing career takes off, her childhood friend Raoul begins to court her, and he and Erik fight jealously for Christine's hand.**strong text**[link text][1]emphasized textstrong textstrong textstrong text

[1]: http://litl

All this time I thought it was about some jerk playing with his organ in the attic. Boy, was I partly wrong.

Eh I don't think I'd recommend it anytime soon. I wasn't a big fan of the writing style it didn't engage me in the way I wanted it to. Kind of drawn out, although I did like the conclusion. I could definitely imagine it as a better opera or play adaptation than it is a book alone, especially if they make it as engaging as I would hope (keeping the 5th box empty, etc), and going along with the story as if it was an opera, where the audience is more a part of the performance than mere spectators. The one redeeming factor that bumped it from 1 stars to 2 stars is the setting. Placing this story in an opera house in the late 1800s was really interesting. I enjoyed learning about the inner workings of an opera house and seeing how the author uses every aspect of the opera house management, architecture, and performances as important pieces of the story. I can tell a lot of thought went into weaving the opera house into the story and I was really impressed by it, it makes me want to go to an opera and get a tour of an opera house, especially it's underground.

I am split with this: the book was not very well written (with the translators keeping the typos with the good old fashioned [sic] when it didn't make sense), using plain prose and jumps between perspectives many times in scenarios that ruin the tension. One of my pet peeves is embedding action in dialogue - which it does many times over.

However, it was a very good story that I feel is ripe for an adaptation to fix these errors - especially with the entire story based around sound and music.

It's one of those times I really anticipate watching a book be improved upon by an adaptation.