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3.63 AVERAGE
3.63 AVERAGE
I liked this a lot but the last forty pages or so really hit me. Cheers to a new year of books you feel in your heart ❤️
Light Perpetual begins during the second world war, with a bomb falling on a branch of Woolworths in southeast London killing the five main characters.
Francis Spufford then takes us to an alternative reality, where the bomb fell elsewhere, or failed to explode, and we see the lives of these five children play out. It's a clever way of connecting these otherwise mostly unrelated stories. We visit each character at set points of their lives and the writing is so beautiful, so intricately detailed, that by the end it feels as though each has starred in their own novel. It seems unbelievable that it all has fitted into a single book.
Sometimes a character contemplates their choices in life, pondering their might-have-beens and it feels as though Francis Spufford is reflecting back the possibilities of all the other lives they might have lived, or all the other novels he might have written. The level of research is phenomenal. Everything he writes about rings so true, whether it's printing techniques, the process of turning a school into an Academy, songwriting or mental health, it's as though he's lived a thousand lives just to write about these five.
Stunning prose, exquisitely layered.
Francis Spufford then takes us to an alternative reality, where the bomb fell elsewhere, or failed to explode, and we see the lives of these five children play out. It's a clever way of connecting these otherwise mostly unrelated stories. We visit each character at set points of their lives and the writing is so beautiful, so intricately detailed, that by the end it feels as though each has starred in their own novel. It seems unbelievable that it all has fitted into a single book.
Sometimes a character contemplates their choices in life, pondering their might-have-beens and it feels as though Francis Spufford is reflecting back the possibilities of all the other lives they might have lived, or all the other novels he might have written. The level of research is phenomenal. Everything he writes about rings so true, whether it's printing techniques, the process of turning a school into an Academy, songwriting or mental health, it's as though he's lived a thousand lives just to write about these five.
Stunning prose, exquisitely layered.
emotional
hopeful
sad
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
Complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Complicated
Adding this review to StoryGraph close to two years after I read it, so I'll keep this short. While there were maybe a few sections of the book that didn't work for me all the way, I was deeply moved by it throughout by the strength of the premise alone. Every time I remembered that none of this was real, I was filled with a kind of doubled heartbreak -- on the one hand, over the sheer waste of violence, which this book stands as a profound testament against, and on the other, over the divide that must always separate fiction from reality, and one life from another. All fiction is potential; none of it is real, and all of it is. I'm not being very clear here because my feelings on this are complicated. This book is good, but its best level might be its meta, which I can't get over two years later.
emotional
hopeful
reflective
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
No
I really enjoyed Imogen Church reading the audio book and the language. It is only 3 star for me though because the characters who are wonderfully described still feel a bit cliche and predictable.
reflective
slow-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
emotional
reflective
sad
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
N/A
Unconvincing scene at the seaside put me off.
I did like the scene with the print composition tho.
I did like the scene with the print composition tho.