Summary: Two families struggle in the same home over a century apart.
Rating & Recommendation: 3/5
Review: To make a long story short, I didn’t really enjoy this one very much. By the time the story picked up, the book was almost over. The crafting of the narratives – two parallel stories taking place some 150 years apart under the same roof – is clever. The book is primarily about a family living in a crumbling home, the matriarch struggling to hold her crumbling family together. Her research about the property leads her to uncover the lives of its long-forgotten residents of the late-Victorian era.
Unfortunately, the writing of this was only mediocre, and the points were heavy-handed. The word “shelter” appeared in this book far too many times. I felt like I was being bludgeoned by her subtlety. Still, the book has a point to make:
“without shelter, we stand in daylight.”
Which is to say, without the comfort of familiar things, familiar ideals, familiar beliefs, we are forced to reckon with what is true. The entire book is about being dispelled of our beliefs, which is ultimately terrifying. We identify with our beliefs, and when they’re threatened, we feel ourselves, our identities, also threatened.
“We are often persuaded that what is convenient is also right.”
I thought this was the meat of the story – that we’re self-interested and lazy, too lazy to look beyond what we think we know to explore what might also be true, even if it contradicts our belief system.
I just wanted this to be more engaging, but the not-so-subtle references to current politics and the not-so-subtle references to the oppression of women in the 1870s made me wish it had just been a history book about this really cool female scientist and her fascinating studies. The fictionalized parts around her just… aren’t that gripping.
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