A review by montagves
Bodies of Light by Sarah Moss

3.0

3.5/5. I liked the second part a whole lot better than the first one, so hopefully I'll love Signs for Lost Children (which I already bought the other day, seeing that I might end up not leaving the house for the next couple of weeks due to the COVID lockdown & quarantine). Elizabeth pretty much sucked the energy out of the whole thing – which is interesting because I gather many women would have acted like her back in the day, but I simply couldn't bring myself to care about what was going on most of the time, with her becoming more and more of a one-dimensional character and less of an accurate portrait of what conservative women must have been like a century and a half ago. I just didn't get why Alfred, a painter of such hedonistic nature, would marry a woman like Elizabeth to begin with? I expected some growth from either of them during their marriage, but it's a shame it never happened. I also hated how May's character was just thrown to waste — her rebellious spirit was a whole lot more believable than Ally's intention of becoming a carbon copy of their mother, but I feel as though the author didn't quite know what to do with her once she decided to focus on Ally's narrative in London.

So yes — the writing is beautiful and often riveting, and the last 100 pages were absolutely exceptional — I loved Annie, Uncle James, the cousins, and of course Tom Cavendish — but I really do wish the first half hadn't been such a pain in the arse.