A review by octophile
Middlemarch by George Eliot

5.0

Life has a way of ruining people's ambitions, even when those ambitions are good and noble ones. Sometimes things work out anyway, so that's still ok. Sometimes it doesn't work out. Maybe that's also still ok.

Terrific main characters and many brilliant passages; most clear when portraying their painfully constructed goals and motives. A good ending, too (though I do wonder what happened to Bulstrode?), and the overarching themes are strong, but there's a lack of relevance in some of the details which I guess was bound to happen in something published serially.

(p.s: Jane Austen, eat your heart out)