I started this book looking for a fun, literary mystery set in my beloved Oxford and I got so much more than that. First off, I loved this book and couldn’t put it down, and it is absolutely deserving of all the praise it receives. It is funny and poignant and beautifully written, with incredible attention to detail and complex character development. It also can’t be pigeonholed into a genre—it is not any one thing, and it is the best standalone novel I have read in years. This book is a mystery, love story, coming of age story, tribute to Oxford—but it is also an exploration of the duties we owe our families and each other, how to go on loving your heroes once they inevitably fall from their pedestals, how we make ourselves heard in a society uninterested in hearing what we have to say, and even how and why we read. I feel like I will need to read it several times to process all of the amazing insights in this complex, multi-layered book.
Cleverly woven in with the type of plot elements that keep us smiling and turning the pages is a serious novel that uses the awkward, occasionally self-loathing but simultaneously self-aware eyes of its young and bumbling heroine to explore complicated questions about being a human at any age but especially a growing-up human. Samantha is a solid entry in the canon of angsty teenage narrators. I found her eminently relatable through her self-doubt and confusion, and her sarcasm is tempered by her awareness of moments she is being unreasonably sour or irrational. I can handle a narrator who makes melodramatic statements as long as she is aware of self-created ridiculousness, and I was really impressed with Lowell’s ability to create such a completely formed and yet still evolving personality.
I think it’s really interesting that the romance relationship between Samantha and Orville was so central for many readers—for me, an equally central if not strikingly more important relationship at the core of the novel was the relationship between Samantha and her father over her whole life. I thought Lowell handled the evolution of parent-child relationships from childhood to adulthood beautifully and respectfully, and showcased how true love, loyalty, and adoration can exist even within a structure of dysfunction.
I do understand why some readers perhaps feel that they didn’t get exactly what they signed up for—the book has a very appealing and whimsical dust jacket (which we really can’t fault, because after all, that’s what gets us to pick it up) and the description of the plot focuses more on the mystery aspects than I think the book itself does. For hardcore Bronte fans who were looking for a book focused on the more famous Brontes, or who were seeking strong parallels between Bronte characters and the characters in Lowell’s book, I think that a looser approach is needed. This book is its own story. I’d recommend for readers looking for that one thing (a mystery, a literary romp, an entry in the Bronte canon) to keep an open mind because all of those things are just elements of this much more varied novel.
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Cliente Amazon
Interesting and entertaining book
Reviewed in Spain on July 18, 2017David Carr
Absorbing, fun and elucidating!!
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on March 20, 2016