mjewrites 's review for:

The House of the Seven Gables by Nathaniel Hawthorne

3.75

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Great story, much attention to detail (maybe a little too much sometimes), great writing on a technical level. But something felt lacking to me. Sometimes I wasn’t always engaged, couldn’t understand what was happening, and was wondering what the point of an entire paragraph or more was, although I tend to have this problem with books written pre-20th century so it could just be me. Though billed as a romance, little of that came through to me. Hawthorne seems to love using the narrator as a framing device, which often takes me out of the story because I’m constantly reminded that I’m being told a story. The history of the actual house and what inspired the novel is more interesting to me than the novel itself, I think, but I would also read again. A good read overall, especially after having visited the actual house in Salem.