CBR10Bingo: The Book Was Better? This was another square I struggled to fill, until a flash of inspiration hit me. I remembered that I had bought Park Chan-wook’s The Handmaiden on a whim several months ago but never actually watched it, giving me the perfect excuse to buy and read Fingersmith by Sarah Waters and then finally watch the film. Done and done. Sue was born in a cramped house of thieves and orphaned when her mother was hanged for murder. Mrs. Sucksby has raised […]
I made what can only have been a few rather idiotic observations about the bricks.
I will say this ahead of time….I tend to find Sarah Waters’s novels to be pretty good in general, if a little either overpromised or underwhelming. And this one is more or less the same. The setup is very good for a lot of reasons. The story is Dr Faraday, a country doctor who sees to a small community also stops in at the local estate, with which he shares a small history–his mother was once on the staff there. The family is left to […]
Great first introduction to a new (to me) author
Sometimes you finish a novel and get pissed off; sometimes you are sad to see it end; sometimes you feel cheated and sometimes you immediately miss the characters and wish to continue their story. Sarah Water’s Fingersmith—the first book by her I’ve read, although not the first she published—falls into the latter category. Set in Victorian-era London, the novel tells the story of Sue Trinder, an orphan who is being raised by a woman named Mrs. Sucksby, who happens to run a “baby farm” […]
“She was like milk – too pale, too pure, too simple. She was made to be spoiled.”
One of my goals for 2017 was to tackle some of the longer books on my TBR — ones I’ve maybe been avoiding in order to keep my count high in previous years! At almost 600 pages, Fingersmith definitely qualifies as long, but the writing hooks you in pretty quickly and it’s hard to put down. Unfortunately, I don’t think the novel as a whole quite held up to the magnificent plot twists — but damn, those twists were impressive. “I give myself up to darkness; and […]