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3.53 AVERAGE
3.53 AVERAGE
adventurous
mysterious
medium-paced
Good premise but a disappointing ending
challenging
mysterious
reflective
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
3.5 stars. I haven't read a book so beautifully written in years and maybe it was this beautiful writing that left me feeling so empty after I turned the last page. I wish there'd been something more to this novel...It was an incredible story of how the lives of two people suddenly intertwined and there's definitely something to take away from that, but I can't shake off the feeling that I've been cheated of a proper ending.
mysterious
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
N/A
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
mysterious
reflective
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
dark
mysterious
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
Content Warnings
Graphic: Medical content
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
Underwhelming and a struggle to get through
mysterious
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
Complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
I was in a reading funk when I picked up this book, having a hard time sticking with anything, so take this review with a grain of salt. I enjoyed the descriptions and setting. The characters and story were interesting enough to keep me engaged and finish the book, but I wasn’t particularly attached and the resolutions to most of the threads weren’t satisfactory. Overall the book is fine.
Here, I think, is the kind of book you get when an author is too fond of her characters. Sarah Perry's The Essex Serpent is set in a time and place that seems perfectly suited to good story-telling: England in the late nineteenth-century, when a widow newly released from an abusive marriage can move between the airless drawing rooms of middle-class London and the misty beauty of a rural marshland village. Add in socialist agitation, beautiful vicar's wives dying of tuberculosis, a possible prehistoric monster terrorising the villagers, the conflict between Darwinian ideas of evolution and a traditionalist Christian view of the world, and this could have been a lush neo-Victorian Gothic novel of ideas.
But there's little complexity here and less atmosphere, no real sense of creeping dread or unease, no narrative tension, and nothing it seemed new to say about either this moment in history or the themes raised. Some of that seemed, as I said, to come from the fact that Perry was too fond of her characters, too unwilling to have their flaws be truly felt or their actions cause hurt. Perry's prose is strong enough to pull you along, particularly the landscape descriptions, but when I reached the last page I was no clearer about what the goal of the novel was than I was when I began the first.
But there's little complexity here and less atmosphere, no real sense of creeping dread or unease, no narrative tension, and nothing it seemed new to say about either this moment in history or the themes raised. Some of that seemed, as I said, to come from the fact that Perry was too fond of her characters, too unwilling to have their flaws be truly felt or their actions cause hurt. Perry's prose is strong enough to pull you along, particularly the landscape descriptions, but when I reached the last page I was no clearer about what the goal of the novel was than I was when I began the first.