Reply to Books you read this summer

Forum Index » Entertainment and Pop Culture

Reply to "Books you read this summer"

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous]I read Florence and Giles by John Harding this summer, and I loved it.  It is almost a retelling of The Turn of the Screw (Henry James story about a Victorian governess who arrives at her new post at a wealthy, absent man's country estate to care for/educate his weird wards, children Flora and Miles.  There might be a haunting at the estate, OR there might be some degree of madness in the characters).  John Harding tells the story from the point of view of the girl child, who he has renamed Florence.  Harding's Florence has a distinctive voice, and if you love novels set in creepy, Victorian country house settings, with governesses and absent parents, you would love this.  I did.  I'm frustrated that I've read every book of this genre I know of, so I'm thrilled to find a new one.

But then, this past week I discovered Harding's newest novel, The Girl Who Couldn't Read, which continues the creepy Victorian orphan's story: now she's a ward in a Victorian mental asylum.  This novel is narrated by a new doctor in the asylum, whose dilemma (not a spoiler: he lets us know this from the beginning) is that he isn't really a doctor, but is an escaped criminal who murdered the actual doctor on a stagecoach, and then assumed that doctor's identity and clothes so that he could take the doctor's place in the new job the murdered doctor had been traveling to take up: physician in a mental asylum.  The new "doctor" takes a liking to mental patient Florence, who claims she can't read, and talks the leading physician into allowing him to treat Florence alone, putting her in improved quarters away  from the other mental patients.  Confusion and Victorian creepiness ensues.  The ending is a nice twist.  You don't need to have read Florence and Giles to love this one, but if you love creepy Victorian novels, you'll want to read that one too.

[/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics