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3.2 AVERAGE
3.2 AVERAGE
emotional
hopeful
mysterious
relaxing
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
Eh I was up and down with this book... it had my attention at times and others it completely lost me. Sometimes he takes pages to describe one thing.. like chickens...
dark
mysterious
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
Nathaniel Hawthorne, native son of New England, and one of the most celebrated American writers of the 19th century, delivers one the classic tales of familial curses and atmospheric terror. Hepzibah and her brother Clifford struggle to survive in their ancestral home against the ravages of age, unfair justice, villainous relatives, and quite possibly the worst of all, retail work.
The underlying story is quite good: a tale of puritanical curses and greed, the Salem witch trials, and hidden treasure; the house itself is built on stolen land, taken from the Maule family by the treacherous Colonel Pyncheon during that disastrous time in Salem. This inevitably leads to a curse, and a house that down through the subsequent ages is privy to all sorts of strange and disturbing events. Only the arrival of their young cousin Pheobe gives any hope at all to the situation, and with the help of the local photographer, they set about building a new life for themselves. The unfortunate romance here is severely unconvincing but it’s thankfully short and not very prominent.
If you are looking for a story rich in gothic atmosphere, the pages here are dripping with the stuff; however, there is so much as too much of a good thing, and Hawthorne quite literally went wild with the metaphor and allusions. Every item in the house and without, the chickens squawking in the yard, the food, the clothes, even the weather, all of it seems to have a second meaning and importance hidden just out of view. In a better paced plot, this adds depth and intrigue; the audience is parsing out clues and history based on the placement of bric-a-brac. In this novel however, the reader is quickly fatigued of implication with no pay-of and grows complacent to otherwise important atmospheric story telling.
Were this story to be shortened to around 75 pages and heavily edited, there is a fairly decent gothic tale and period romance to be enjoyed here. Instead, Hawthorne, wearing out his welcome from the much better Scarlet Letter (also a Salem tale), berates the reader with over 300 pages of slow, tedious lectures on the nature of rail systems and descriptions of every minute detail regardless of whether it contributes to the plot or not. This can be a rewarding book for those invested in the time period and culture, but for the average reader, the genre and style have much better examples than this chore of a novel.
2/5 stars
The underlying story is quite good: a tale of puritanical curses and greed, the Salem witch trials, and hidden treasure; the house itself is built on stolen land, taken from the Maule family by the treacherous Colonel Pyncheon during that disastrous time in Salem. This inevitably leads to a curse, and a house that down through the subsequent ages is privy to all sorts of strange and disturbing events. Only the arrival of their young cousin Pheobe gives any hope at all to the situation, and with the help of the local photographer, they set about building a new life for themselves. The unfortunate romance here is severely unconvincing but it’s thankfully short and not very prominent.
If you are looking for a story rich in gothic atmosphere, the pages here are dripping with the stuff; however, there is so much as too much of a good thing, and Hawthorne quite literally went wild with the metaphor and allusions. Every item in the house and without, the chickens squawking in the yard, the food, the clothes, even the weather, all of it seems to have a second meaning and importance hidden just out of view. In a better paced plot, this adds depth and intrigue; the audience is parsing out clues and history based on the placement of bric-a-brac. In this novel however, the reader is quickly fatigued of implication with no pay-of and grows complacent to otherwise important atmospheric story telling.
Were this story to be shortened to around 75 pages and heavily edited, there is a fairly decent gothic tale and period romance to be enjoyed here. Instead, Hawthorne, wearing out his welcome from the much better Scarlet Letter (also a Salem tale), berates the reader with over 300 pages of slow, tedious lectures on the nature of rail systems and descriptions of every minute detail regardless of whether it contributes to the plot or not. This can be a rewarding book for those invested in the time period and culture, but for the average reader, the genre and style have much better examples than this chore of a novel.
2/5 stars
dark
emotional
mysterious
reflective
sad
tense
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
Complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
I wasn't expecting to enjoy Nathaniel Hawthorne's novel "The House of the Seven Gables," but I really did. It was a good gothic story, with the house itself almost painted as a character, that moved along at a nice pace.
The story focuses on the owners of the seven-gabled homes, the Pyncheon family, which has a rather sordid history associated with the property. As a result, they suffer from a curse of sorts with the bulk of their inheritance -- a deed showing their ownership of a large tract of Maine woodland -- has been lost to time.
I enjoyed the twists and turns of the story and found this fairly compelling.
The story focuses on the owners of the seven-gabled homes, the Pyncheon family, which has a rather sordid history associated with the property. As a result, they suffer from a curse of sorts with the bulk of their inheritance -- a deed showing their ownership of a large tract of Maine woodland -- has been lost to time.
I enjoyed the twists and turns of the story and found this fairly compelling.
Read this in high school and didn't think it was that great. It's plot was decent, as I recall. Like all books I read in my youth, I'd have to reread this one to evaluate it fairly.
