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3.44 AVERAGE
3.44 AVERAGE
mysterious
sad
tense
medium-paced
I gave up about 75% of the way in, it started out great but I got irritated by the characters and the complete implausibility of their relationships. Fun fact about me: when I can't finish reading a book I just skip to the end to see how it wraps up. Sometimes that renews my interest enough to send me back to reading, but in this case it just reinforced my already poor impression.
dark
mysterious
sad
fast-paced
I liked it. The protagonist was novel to me and facsinatingly portrayed. Great foreshadowing in the beginning as well. First chapter and last 100+ pages were kind of boring.
I went into this expecting historical lesbian romance, and ended up with a nail-biting murder trial, and I have absolutely no complaints about that. I thought this would be a slow read because it’s such a thick book, but the pace really speeds up in parts 2 and 3, and from there I couldn’t put it down. The amount of romance was actually pretty perfect for my personal taste, but I think I’d much rather read about Frances and Christina’s story, or about what happens after the ending. I was fully prepared for this ending to be tragic, and I was glad that it wasn’t, but I’d still rather get to see the successes on the page and not just the struggles.
“The gloss would fade in about five minutes as the surface dried; but everything faded. The vital thing was to make the most of the moments of brightness.”
“She loved these walks through London. She seemed, as she made them, to become porous, to soak in detail after detail; or else, like a battery, to become charged. Yes, that was it, she thought, as she turned a corner: it wasn’t a liquid creeping, it was a tingle, something electric, something produced as if by the friction of her shoes against the streets. She was at her truest, it seemed to her, in these tingling moments—these moments when, paradoxically, she was also at her most anonymous.”
“It was like a cure, being with Lilian. It made one feel like a piece of wax being cradled in a soft, warm palm.”
“Some things are so frightful that a bit of madness is the only sane response.”
“It was disconcerting, Frances found, to see Lilian so at home among so many strangers, to think of her as having this world, this life, quite separate from her daily life in the house on Champion Hill. She thought, These people all have their claim on her. What’s mine, exactly?”
“For was that all, she thought bleakly, that love ever was? Something that saved one from loneliness? A sort of insurance policy against not counting?”
“For she knew that her calm came partly from courage, but more from a devastating indifference to what might happen to her now; that she had withstood so many horrors since the night of Leonard’s death that she had become stripped and smooth and colourless, like a tree in a hurricane, like a stone in a pounding sea.”
“She loved these walks through London. She seemed, as she made them, to become porous, to soak in detail after detail; or else, like a battery, to become charged. Yes, that was it, she thought, as she turned a corner: it wasn’t a liquid creeping, it was a tingle, something electric, something produced as if by the friction of her shoes against the streets. She was at her truest, it seemed to her, in these tingling moments—these moments when, paradoxically, she was also at her most anonymous.”
“It was like a cure, being with Lilian. It made one feel like a piece of wax being cradled in a soft, warm palm.”
“Some things are so frightful that a bit of madness is the only sane response.”
“It was disconcerting, Frances found, to see Lilian so at home among so many strangers, to think of her as having this world, this life, quite separate from her daily life in the house on Champion Hill. She thought, These people all have their claim on her. What’s mine, exactly?”
“For was that all, she thought bleakly, that love ever was? Something that saved one from loneliness? A sort of insurance policy against not counting?”
“For she knew that her calm came partly from courage, but more from a devastating indifference to what might happen to her now; that she had withstood so many horrors since the night of Leonard’s death that she had become stripped and smooth and colourless, like a tree in a hurricane, like a stone in a pounding sea.”
dark
emotional
hopeful
tense
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Complicated
tense
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
Complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Complicated
muddled much like the actual book. could've spent more time deepening the relationship between all of them instead of drawing on the murder plotline for 300 pages. 600 pages and i can't guess at the reason of this book
challenging
dark
emotional
mysterious
tense
slow-paced