Reviews tagging 'Death of parent'

The Dictionary of Lost Words by Pip Williams

123 reviews

aaashtyn's review against another edition

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adventurous dark emotional hopeful informative inspiring reflective sad medium-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? A mix
  • Strong character development? It's complicated
  • Loveable characters? Yes
  • Diverse cast of characters? Yes
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

3.75

This book was good, but I think I was expecting a little more in terms of how the dictionary of lost words was going be put into play and make an impact on the story. The first third of the book was really good and intriguing, but then the middle felt slow and didn’t feel like it added much to the story.
I liked how Esme’s daughter finally had a purpose at the end of the book, but for the majority of the book I thought that portion of the story felt pointless.
It was good, but it felt like more needed to happen. I did also enjoy learning about the process of creating the dictionary and all the steps needed, that was interesting to learn about.

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littleobsidian's review against another edition

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emotional informative sad slow-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Plot
  • Strong character development? No
  • Loveable characters? No
  • Diverse cast of characters? Yes
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.5

Wanted to love it but.... kinda boring!

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elaeagnifolium's review against another edition

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adventurous emotional hopeful informative slow-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Character
  • Strong character development? Yes
  • Loveable characters? Yes
  • Diverse cast of characters? No
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

4.0


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sari_lyr's review against another edition

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emotional informative inspiring reflective sad slow-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? A mix
  • Strong character development? Yes
  • Loveable characters? Yes
  • Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated

3.5


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hematthews's review against another edition

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emotional inspiring reflective tense 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

4.25


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irammy's review against another edition

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emotional medium-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Character
  • Strong character development? No
  • Loveable characters? Yes
  • Diverse cast of characters? No
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.75

I wasn't sure what to expect from this book, particularly given it started from the perspective of a child. It became quite a comfortable read, easy to pick up and read a few chapters, although it covered some emotional topics in parts. We grow up with the character, despite this I'm not sure I bought her character development and some aspects felt out of the blue (i.e. first relationship). On the whole, it was interesting read set to the backdrop of the suffrage movement and WW1 which got me thinking about the meaning of words and how language is and isn't controlled. Definitely thought provoking and educational given the care to match historical details. 

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writingbugtop's review against another edition

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challenging dark emotional informative inspiring reflective sad slow-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Character
  • Strong character development? Yes
  • Loveable characters? Yes
  • Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

5.0


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ashlynmae311's review against another edition

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emotional hopeful informative inspiring reflective sad fast-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Character
  • Strong character development? Yes
  • Loveable characters? Yes
  • Diverse cast of characters? No
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.5

This book helped me understand my own experience as a woman so much more deeply. She puts words to my own struggles, sorrows, and joys in a truly unique and inspired way.

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beautifulpaxielreads's review against another edition

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challenging emotional reflective medium-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? A mix
  • Strong character development? It's complicated
  • Loveable characters? It's complicated
  • Diverse cast of characters? No
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

4.0

Pip Williams' The Dictionary of Lost Words is one of the most meaningful, thought-provoking novels I have ever read, and yet there were parts of it that I struggled with.

As the title suggests, this is a book about words, more specifically those words that are not considered important enough to be compiled into the first-ever edition of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED). Since the task of compiling the OED is largely left to older white men, inevitably their ingrained biases ensure that the dictionary is skewed towards a male view of the world, and this is writ large when it comes to the male attitude to women.

In the year 1901, one of the OED's loyal fans discovered that the word "bondmaid" was missing from the dictionary. It is from this factual nugget that Pip Williams has constructed the fictional character and heroine of the novel, Esme Nicoll. The story of the novel is the story of Esme's life,  covering  late Victorian-era Great Britain to the First World War. 

The novel was written almost entirely (
aside from the last two chapters
) from Esme's POV, and this was where I had the most difficulty. Even though I could see Williams had crafted Esme with great care, and I (mostly) liked and sympathised with her, she seemed passive in many ways and I struggled to truly understand her motivations and feelings. 

In terms of other characters, I most liked Harry, Esme's widowed father, Edith "Ditte" Thompson, Esme's mentor and mother figure, and Lizzie, a serving maid at  Murray household where Esme spends her childhood and whom Esme eventually
develops a close bond with
.

I also had some issues with the novel's structure and pacing, which seemed uneven to me. Even though the beginning of each chapter stated the year and the month in which it was set, the time jumps could be hours, days, weeks, or even months at a time. These jumps were not always consistent, leaving me confused as to just how much time had passed between the beginning and end of a chapter. It kind of felt a bit lumpy.

Ultimately, it was the themes of this novel that I most strongly resonated with - the way certain words were defined to degrade not only by gender but by social status, the way words could come to mean more than one thing, the development of slang and curse words, and most poignantly, the inadequacy of words to describe the human experience. 

This is a novel that, to me, asks two fundamental questions: Whose words matter? And almost more importantly, who gets to decide?

A moving, thought-provoking read.





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orlagal's review against another edition

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emotional reflective sad medium-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? A mix
  • Strong character development? Yes
  • Loveable characters? Yes
  • Diverse cast of characters? Yes
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0


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