Reviews and Comments

This still has plenty of the engrossing virtues of the earlier volume, but some of the story tie-ups are less satisfying than the ones in volume 4, and there are ultimately too many younger-generation characters who are never fully fleshed out.

And this is a minor complaint, but the revelation of just HOW LITTLE the Cazalet brothers know about business is pretty hard to swallow. Seriously, no one at their company reads the mail from the bank and passes it on to management? They never asked their accountants for input all the time they were arguing about whether to buy or sell parts of the business? I mean, maybe this is really what the upper classes did? Astonishing if true.

I always want Meg Wolitzer to be harder-hitting, but she writes better than almost anyone else about how young people fumble through life trying to figure themselves out, and she does it here too. I enjoyed it and I liked the reflections about first- and second-wave feminists trying to make sense of each other and of how feminism and capitalism can manage to coexist. It's enjoyably smart middlebrow writing.

Be warned, it's a very white lady book and more or less acknowledges that so don't go looking for depth of intersectional politics.

As literature this is a preposterous pile of Victorian sentimental novel cliches, including identical twins of mysterious parentage, mistaken identity, a Bad Man and more than one Man with a Secret Past, gypsy clairvoyance and snake charming, exile to the diamond mines of South Africa, and of course lots of True Love, but it's engagingly written and the heroine has some grit. It might be good summer reading if you like old-fashioned genre fiction. There are a couple of shockingly racist bits but they go by quickly.

A beloved re-read.

Perfect for comfort rereading.

This book suffered a little from my recent reading of an even more ebulliently tree-infused book (The Overstory) but it's very engaging. Portrait of a truly awful marriage surviving somehow on the frontier in the first half of the nineteenth century, with the chosen bone of contention being the contents of the apple orchard, and how both the tree-madness and the misery fall to the next generation. It was influenced by Michael Pollan's writing about Johnny Appleseed, and he is a minor character, but he never takes over the novel which is its own thing, just what I like in a historical novel.