March 2019 - Alison Ver Halen

Wives and Daughters

Romance, science, patriarchy, sisterhood, female friendships, money, hierarchy, aristocracy, the status quo. It’s all in Gaskell’s last novel.

There is nothing but this spoon. There has never been another spoon. There will never be another spoon. Everything is in that spoon.

This book hit home in a way I hadn’t been expecting, but it was oddly comforting and I don’t regret having read it when I did.

I don’t know what they were smoking when they thought some divine being was talking to them, but clearly they didn’t get everything right.

I was kind of underwhelmed by this book, but don’t put too much stock in my experience because I think I just wasn’t in the right mood for it.

Anyone watching Herb would have thought he was an important man handling important matters.

Overall I liked this book, and I learned a lot from it, even if the author sometimes proved as unreliable as Nabokov’s narrator.

Where was he? It shouldn’t have taken him this long. Galadriel’s mind raced with all the things that could have gone wrong.

I wasn’t sure about this book at first, but I ended up enjoying it more than some members of my book club.