julian-lois

Overall I really liked this book. We also had great discussion at book club. Those 2 hours really flew by! It was nice to have great discussion on a book that everybody didn't hate :) This is a very rich and deep book so it's hard to decide what to talk about. There were so many interesting themes that the author developes so well. My favorite is probably the books/reading one. Margaret, one of our main narrators, works in her father's bookshop and is pretty much a reading addict. But in a good way. I found her similar to myself in many ways, specifically in how involved she gets with her current story. Margaret is writing the biography of Vida Winter, a mysterious and feisty author who is very well-known throughout England. Throughout the novel Margaret shares with the reader just how much she is being pulled into Miss Winter's story (which turns out to be true...well mostly). Another theme is identity. The author is a master at setting the reader up to think one thing about a character but then totally shattering that idea later on in the book. It makes the reader then question other parts of the story and characters even more now that this one idea has been challenged. I'm not going to give examples on this b/c it would give away key plots of the story. Normally this technique of challenging my conceptions of characters would drive me crazy but in this case, it was very well done and almost like a game. It showed just how slippery identity can be. And also how much power the author really has. I read in the back of the book that it took the author 3 years to write this book. That is not surprising given the many levels of character and mystery contained in this book. The only thing I didn't like so much was the fact that so many of the big reveals/pieces to the puzzle didn't come until the last 100 pages. Maybe that's not so bad but since I read the last 100 pages in a day, it seemed like they just came one after another and I didn't have time to really process them. I would have liked some of them to be revealed earlier so I could process the whole big picture of Miss Winter's story. But I liked this author's style a lot so I would definitely read her next book.

2023-01-08 17:52