sonjas27 's review for:

Middlemarch by George Eliot
4.0

"Explain! Tell a man to explain how he dropped into hell! Explain my preference! I never had a preference for her, any more than I have a preference for breathing. No other woman exists by the side of her. I would rather touch her hand if it were dead, than I would touch any other woman's living."

Every time I finish a book this big, I feel like giving myself a tiny medal.

Middlemarch was quite a journey. It might be weird to say this, but the structure kinda reminded me of Anna Karenina, in a sense that it was a large picture of a specific community, told through a multitude of characters and their always intertwining lives. Of course, it was fundamentally different location-wise and mentality-wise.

My favourite character was Dorothea, and I was actually really surprised when Willothea (I made up their ship name, just go with it) ended up being endgame. For quite a while I seriously thought the ship was damaged beyond repair, but I'm glad they got their happy ending, after over 600 pages of pain and angst. Fred and Mary also had a really cute epilogue and Rosamond pretty much stayed true to her bossy and spoiled self till the end