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A review by lauriestein
The Children's Book by A.S. Byatt
5.0
Beautiful and haunting and sweeping and tragic and allusive and literary. All about the contexts and spaces in-between of the golden age of children's literature, the everyday hidden depths and fictional surfaces of childhood and adulthood and family and friendship. The Victorian progresses/descends into the Edwardian and into war and out. Packed chock full of ideas and art and tales and leaves one with simultaneous urges to make, hold, exhibit, and smash a pot.
I can see the critiques: too much history-telling (but I never will have a problem with that), too much heavy-handed allegory (but how could it be otherwise in a fairy tale?), too much allusion (and I probably didn't even catch half of it), too many characters (but I could read a novel about each of them). I think I liked this too much and inhabited it too fully to sensibly review it. It's so desperately, wonderfully evocative of the period and its literature and art and generation gap. It's one of those books that makes me want to read everything.
How funny that I finished reading it on November 11.
I can see the critiques: too much history-telling (but I never will have a problem with that), too much heavy-handed allegory (but how could it be otherwise in a fairy tale?), too much allusion (and I probably didn't even catch half of it), too many characters (but I could read a novel about each of them). I think I liked this too much and inhabited it too fully to sensibly review it. It's so desperately, wonderfully evocative of the period and its literature and art and generation gap. It's one of those books that makes me want to read everything.
How funny that I finished reading it on November 11.