Take a photo of a barcode or cover
3.73 AVERAGE
3.73 AVERAGE
I loved this book. Is has been sitting on my shelf for about a year and i started it several times. It is a slow starter so give it a 100 pages to get going. Once I knew who the four main characters were I quickly became engrossed in their stories. The unusual reverse historical story style was fantastic and added a whole new element to the story. It was refreshing to know what was going to happen to the characters and the mysteries of the past gradually revealed in a series of aha moments. A great read.
Another tremendous and highly compelling novel from Waters, though this one was less satisfying ultimately than Fingersmith or The Paying Guests, because there's much less sense of any unifying plot, or even any start-to-finish arc. The book eventually ends on a flashback, which fills in some missing pieces about a few key events, but doesn't leave any sense of where the characters go in the book's present. And they're linked more by proximity and circumstance and a daisy-chain of personal ties than by any sort of shared theme or idea. The book takes place in London during the Blitz and after World War II, with bombs raining down nightly in the flashback sequences, and the characters, mostly female, dealing with the re-establishment of social mores afterward, and the risk of imprisonment they run for being lesbians. There's a lot of personal business—an unwanted pregnancy, a woman cheating on her lover, a man suffering through jail—and very little of it is ever resolved. But it's so absorbing while it's happening. Waters writes with such a compelling sense of time and place, from little slang expressions to the details of daily living in this era, and she strikes a perfect point between prose flowery enough to seem artful and heightened, and prose prosaic enough to seem real. It's amazing to me how she manages to make day-to-day life seem so breathless and absorbing.
It was fine, but at the same time - I was forcing myself to finish it. Somehow I just... didn't really care.
usually i know a book is brilliant if i finish it and want to immediately go back and reread tiny details. sarah waters writes complex stories, each with little parts you only see the significance of much later, making rereading them a completely different experience.
i think that if i read this again (as it is told in reverse) i would read it backwards, therefore in chronological order, and see the difference it makes now i know the major plot points. some stories begin depressing and end with hope; others are the opposite. ultimately it begins and ends in tragedy, and despite it being so saddening i’ve really loved it.
i think that if i read this again (as it is told in reverse) i would read it backwards, therefore in chronological order, and see the difference it makes now i know the major plot points. some stories begin depressing and end with hope; others are the opposite. ultimately it begins and ends in tragedy, and despite it being so saddening i’ve really loved it.
Not my favorite of hers - I found there to be too many story lines and characters to keep my attention at times. But I liked the idea of telling the story in reverse chronological order, and it was, as always, very rich in detail and well researched.
challenging
emotional
sad
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
Complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
I hate that I didn't care for this, as I've liked all of the other books of hers I've read so far! Thos was just boring. I didn't like any of the characters. I didn't care about them, or about what happened to them. I would not have finished it except I kept thinking it would get better because it's Sarah Waters. The abortion scene was quite well done and bumped this up to two stars for me, but even it had this feeling of disconnect because you know she survives, and continues to see the horrid man!!! It just makes you dislike her even more. Duncan's story was particularly dissatisfying as the idea of a conscientious objector in WWII, the war in which we most hail soldiers and hate dissenters, was intriguing, but dear god his story was boring. Overall quite disappointing.
I think I loved it because I keep buying more books by the same author
This is my third SW book. Reading her novels is as close to time travel as I ever expect to get.