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gracer 's review for:
Night and Day
by Virginia Woolf
challenging
emotional
hopeful
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
I haven't read much Virginia Woolf. I read The Voyage Out once, many years ago, after my grandfather gave me a copy on two separate occasions, and I read it very slowly and don't remember very much of it.
I finally got to this one by making a list of classics (anything that I decide fits the definition) that I've been meaning to read and committing to reading four of them this year. This is the second one (1st was The Tenant of Wildfell Hall) and I am glad that I did, because now I can get on to her more famous works. (The same grandfather said you should always read books in the order that they were written by the author, so you can see how their voice develops, etc; this is not a hard-and-fast rule that I stick to, but sometimes find myself picking up one book and then thinking, "But I haven't read ___ yet!")
Night and Day hit two very high notes: The language and the characters. The plot, however, had some issues.
I thought the characters were fascinating, likable, intriguing, and somehow simultaeneously understandable and mysterious. Mary, Katharine, and Ralph all had their charms, their strange habits, their annoying preconceptions/attitudes/tics. But I was rooting for all of them, each in their own way. Even Katharine's parents, annoying at times, were realistic, human, alternating between irritating and helpful. I wanted to know what would happen to each of them and how they would find themselves living their best lives, to put it in (slightly outdated) contemporary slang.
The one issue here was the big miss of a character in William Rodney. He was bland, never came alive for me, and felt extremely unlikable - but I don't think he was supposed to be.
The language was lovely, if difficult at times; I marked so many texts and passages because of beautiful descriptive imagery, etc, etc. It's as if Woolf is famous for her writing...
But the plot had some issues. It seemed to go on and on, making itself much more complicated than necessary, leaving us with questions about a few of the characters who seemed to get cast off in the end. While the two main characters are well accounted for (although their hemming and hawing seems to take more pages than needed), there are others who seem to disappear almost without a trace, and certainly without the ending I felt they deserved.
Overall, a good book that was a very enjoyable reading experience, but I have to say I am looking forward to the 250-page works of Woolf's that are lying on my reading horizon...
I finally got to this one by making a list of classics (anything that I decide fits the definition) that I've been meaning to read and committing to reading four of them this year. This is the second one (1st was The Tenant of Wildfell Hall) and I am glad that I did, because now I can get on to her more famous works. (The same grandfather said you should always read books in the order that they were written by the author, so you can see how their voice develops, etc; this is not a hard-and-fast rule that I stick to, but sometimes find myself picking up one book and then thinking, "But I haven't read ___ yet!")
Night and Day hit two very high notes: The language and the characters. The plot, however, had some issues.
I thought the characters were fascinating, likable, intriguing, and somehow simultaeneously understandable and mysterious. Mary, Katharine, and Ralph all had their charms, their strange habits, their annoying preconceptions/attitudes/tics. But I was rooting for all of them, each in their own way. Even Katharine's parents, annoying at times, were realistic, human, alternating between irritating and helpful. I wanted to know what would happen to each of them and how they would find themselves living their best lives, to put it in (slightly outdated) contemporary slang.
The one issue here was the big miss of a character in William Rodney. He was bland, never came alive for me, and felt extremely unlikable - but I don't think he was supposed to be.
The language was lovely, if difficult at times; I marked so many texts and passages because of beautiful descriptive imagery, etc, etc. It's as if Woolf is famous for her writing...
But the plot had some issues. It seemed to go on and on, making itself much more complicated than necessary, leaving us with questions about a few of the characters who seemed to get cast off in the end. While the two main characters are well accounted for (although their hemming and hawing seems to take more pages than needed), there are others who seem to disappear almost without a trace, and certainly without the ending I felt they deserved.
Overall, a good book that was a very enjoyable reading experience, but I have to say I am looking forward to the 250-page works of Woolf's that are lying on my reading horizon...