Review of 'Farthing' on 'Goodreads'
3 stars
This book's plot was engaging and the writing was fair enough and the subject (political country house murder in an alternate-history Britain where the Brits made peace with Hitler instead of defeating him) was quite interest to me and yet there was something twee about it that put me off. In particular, the cutesiness with which the sheltered narrator (who is married to her brother's best friend, a dreamy assimilated Jew) talks about sex is fairly sickmaking. Maybe accurately so (look how all those Mitfords nicknamed everything) but her tone and her utter sympatheticness as a character made it hard for me to either entirely believe in her as a person, or like her as a fiction.
Funnily enough the other book of Walton's I read, which dresses up a plot of Trollope's! only all the characters are talking DRAGONS! managed to be much gritter and less cute. Maybe if …
This book's plot was engaging and the writing was fair enough and the subject (political country house murder in an alternate-history Britain where the Brits made peace with Hitler instead of defeating him) was quite interest to me and yet there was something twee about it that put me off. In particular, the cutesiness with which the sheltered narrator (who is married to her brother's best friend, a dreamy assimilated Jew) talks about sex is fairly sickmaking. Maybe accurately so (look how all those Mitfords nicknamed everything) but her tone and her utter sympatheticness as a character made it hard for me to either entirely believe in her as a person, or like her as a fiction.
Funnily enough the other book of Walton's I read, which dresses up a plot of Trollope's! only all the characters are talking DRAGONS! managed to be much gritter and less cute. Maybe if there had been more disembowelment I would have liked this more.