Everyman wrote:
Well, I confess it.
I am finding the perpetual angst of this book and the way too many obvious attempts to create mystery to be too much for my tastes. The end of chapter 9, "I wasn't to find out for two more years, on the day Mother died, why he was so unusually interested in it" to be the last straw. I just had to sigh and say "oh, come on." If she was truly his assistant, why wouldn't he have told her? The only point of withholding that would seem to be for Adams to add yet another cliffhanger to a book that is so full of them that it's tiring.
And the moths. Yes, the discussion of free will was interesting as a philosophical discussion, but otherwise, how could moths be made any less interesting? I tend to enjoy books whose authors take me into unfamiliar realms of activity. Trollope and his fox-hunting; normally I have very little interest in fox hunting, but Trollope pulls me into it and arouses my interest. Dick Francis and racing: I have never been to a horse race, was not raised around horses, and but for a summer when I dated a girl who owned horses have had nothing to do with them and no particular interest in them, but Francis makes the smallest details of racing fascinating and draws me inexorably into that world. The campanology of Dorothy Sayers's The Nine Tailors, the Egyptology of Peters's Amelia Peabody books, have both given me great enjoyment learning about things I didn't realize I could be much interested in. But frankly I don't find anything of this sort with Adams and her moths. After several chapters of them I never want to hear another word about moths (but I know I will).
I frankly don't care whether Ginny pushed Vivi off the bell tower or not. Push, no push, who cares? Not I.
If this were a book I had gotten out of the library, it would go back unfinished. Because I so greatly enjoy the discussions here and enjoy being a part of them I will stick with the book. Even a not very good book can be the basis of a very good discussion.
But unless things get a lot better very soon, this is not a book I will recommend to any friend whose good opinion I value.
Enough of this rant. Back to the discussion, with thanks to everyone here for making that discussion so interesting and enjoyable.
I have to agree with those who are enjoying this book. I think it comes down to a matter of preference in writing style. As I said in chapter 1, this book and the style of writing reminds me of Rebecca by Daphne DuMaurier, and I loved that book. But, you have to like the style of writing where you have to assume a lot of information, or where you have to fish out the information from the details in the book. I also think in this story, Ginny's disorder, be it mental health or autistic, is the backbone of the story, and that, if you consider that, the author did a fabulous job of portraying the story through the disorder.
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