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bagdriwicz 's review for:
Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
by Susanna Clarke
It’s sometimes easier to articulate what I dislike about a book than what I like, because when it comes to this book, I love everything. So this is an inarticulate jumble of what I enjoyed. I suppose the characters are my usual starting place. The cast of characters is vast, and while many of them are actively unlikeable, all of them are highly entertaining. I really enjoyed the tone of the book and the themes. It’s genuinely funny, but also poignant and dramatic and all the things a good story should be. And the imagery is often so vivid, especially when describing disgusting things. I’m still haunted by the cheese faced madhouse attendant and his fly leg whiskers. But the settings and enchantments were often equally as vivid and wonderful. The narrative is a well executed deconstruction of similar histories that laude its (white) male heroes. Because titular characters are not the heroes of the book. Their carelessness and fear and arrogance causes suffering for the people around them who aren’t as privileged. Their actions start the domino chain of events that are the main conflict. And even though the book is ridiculously long, it never felt like a chore to get through. I was hooked almost immediately. You know the feeling you get when you’re in the middle of a good book? You want to know what happens next, but you don’t want to reach the end, because then it’s over. That was how I was feeling the whole time. And now I want to read it again and annotate it and write a million essays about it, because there’s so much to unpack in this one lovely story.