Instruct: Classify the given Amazon review as either positive or negative.
Query: Dreadful writing a translation from some alien tongue?

I typically enjoy historical mysteries, but the writing in this book was so horribly awful that I was unable to finish it, even though it was the only un-read book in the house (imagine you're hungry and bite into your last commestible only to find it is a brussels sprout and you get the idea). You remember in Men In Black, how the ship-wrecked alien "slipped into" the farmer's body and animated it in an almost totally unconvincing manner? That's what the writing in this book is like. A dry recitation of facts about the period would have been more appealing than this attempt to "bring them to life" with the help of completely unsympathetic characters and a dreadfully stilted prose that isn't modern, isn't period, is just awful. Even the wording of the dedication makes one wince. The only use I can see for this book is to serve as a text in a "how not to write" class.