Rebecca

What a beautiful and riveting book.

This book starts off almost like an homage to the classic “ex-partner” emotional baggage that many of us have experienced before in our lives. The feeling when you've just gone serious with someone special, but everyone around them seems to only look at you just to compare you with their previous long-term partner. The feeling of never being able to live up to expectations and that you're not welcome in your new partner's life. It ambles along slowly and I took about 5 days to get up to the halfway mark.

Today, when I finally got up to about halfway and a major event happens (Mrs. Danver's bitchiness at the fancy dress ball), I had an inkling that things were coming to a head. And, boy, was I right. The second half of the book simply flew by and I refused to do anything else but sit and finish it. If the first half of the book read like a slow and abstract stroll through a patch of woods that you can't decide was more sorrowful, beautiful, or sinister, the second half of the book is when you realise you're not in Kansas anymore.