One of the characters in The House on Fortune Street by Margot Livesy believes that "everyone has a book or a writer who's the key to their life". Isn't that an interesting idea? I know who my writer would be, and so do the four main characters in this book. Each section is told from a different one of their viewpoints and somehow ties in to the books and writers that are the keys to their stories- Alice in Wonderland, Jane Eyre, Charles Dickens, and the poems of Keats.
This book was not what I had expected it to be, and not what the synopsis leads you to believe it will be. It's about the tangled lives of four people, but their lives aren't entangled in the obvious way that you'd expect. There's a strong sense of the key to the story being revealed bit by bit as the novel progresses. There are quite a few instances where the author leads you to unravel the next piece of the puzzle just by dropping a word as a hint, or conjuring up a vague feeling of suspicion about a character. It's a subtle and impressive feat of writing to be able to pull that off, and it made me really, really like this book.
This book was not what I had expected it to be, and not what the synopsis leads you to believe it will be. It's about the tangled lives of four people, but their lives aren't entangled in the obvious way that you'd expect. There's a strong sense of the key to the story being revealed bit by bit as the novel progresses. There are quite a few instances where the author leads you to unravel the next piece of the puzzle just by dropping a word as a hint, or conjuring up a vague feeling of suspicion about a character. It's a subtle and impressive feat of writing to be able to pull that off, and it made me really, really like this book.
I'm going to have to look for this book. Sounds really good! Also, who is your writer?? :)
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