Take a photo of a barcode or cover
laerugo 's review for:
I Capture the Castle
by Dodie Smith
this was a nice summer read if i didn't think about it too much, lol. i borrowed this from the library on a whim after seeing it and remembering a friend really liked it, but i didn't know what kind of book it would be or what it was about when i picked it up, so i was a little dismayed to realize it featured a young english girl and her coming of age story as she wrote in her diary... which is not normally the kind of thing i'd pick out for myself. i often got frustrated with characters for being childish (beyond the limits of what i'd consider tolerable, at least, considering half of them were older teenagers). there's a love... pentagon, i guess, with occasionally frustrating notions of "you should've gone for the nice boy who loves you who you don't care about at all."
some parts of this book didn't age well. there's a bizarre subplot of a borderline-abusive father being told he should be allowed to be angry and violent if it produces good art (i don't think domestic abuse is what what the author was getting at, but i think the parallels of domestic violence are too difficult to ignore.) the only person of color, a (black?) woman, is consistently described with awful, unflattering words like "greasy" and the narrator talks about how much she dislikes her for rudeness or nagging or this or that childish reason.
all that said, i read it over a week and if i turned my brain off, i enjoyed large parts of it. cassandra really is a teenager, which works to the author's benefit and downfall sometimes, and she writes and thinks like a teenager writes and thinks, which can be genuinely hard to pull off and still make her likable. i came to like her over time, but it did take a while. other characters were not so lucky: they consistently remained selfish, although of course i see things through cassandra's point of view and i'm sure she's biased.
anyway. give it a go if you like stories about the english countryside and young people in love squares, otherwise, it's really an acquired taste.
some parts of this book didn't age well. there's a bizarre subplot of a borderline-abusive father being told he should be allowed to be angry and violent if it produces good art (i don't think domestic abuse is what what the author was getting at, but i think the parallels of domestic violence are too difficult to ignore.) the only person of color, a (black?) woman, is consistently described with awful, unflattering words like "greasy" and the narrator talks about how much she dislikes her for rudeness or nagging or this or that childish reason.
all that said, i read it over a week and if i turned my brain off, i enjoyed large parts of it. cassandra really is a teenager, which works to the author's benefit and downfall sometimes, and she writes and thinks like a teenager writes and thinks, which can be genuinely hard to pull off and still make her likable. i came to like her over time, but it did take a while. other characters were not so lucky: they consistently remained selfish, although of course i see things through cassandra's point of view and i'm sure she's biased.
anyway. give it a go if you like stories about the english countryside and young people in love squares, otherwise, it's really an acquired taste.