A review by hannahlee
The Country of the Pointed Firs: And Other Stories by Sarah Orne Jewett

3.0

Okay, listen, I read the title piece but not the "other stories." I wanted to like this a lot more than I ended up doing. While I appreciated the nice Maine atmosphere and the glimmers of colorful characters that we saw, I felt that Pointed Firs really didn't delve deeply enough into the characterizations to let me connect with the protagonist or any of the other players in the story. The dialog, written largely in what I assume was intended to simulate a "Maine dialect," was difficult to parse and didn't evoke the accent naturally - I could start to hear it with a lot of intentional work on my part, but on the page it looked like a more southern accent. Sometimes the story had some charm, but overall it felt under-developed to me, without a lot of emotional resonance.