…for a certain kind of reader — mostly women, mostly bookish — it is perfect. Once you read it, you fall in love with it, and from then on you’re part of a secret club, self-selecting and wildly enthusiastic. I picked up Dodie Smith’s I Capture the Castle based on this piece from Vox, quoted above, but I am sorry to say that, while I mostly enjoyed the novel, I am not part of the secret club. Set in the 1930s, I Capture the Castle features a […]
“All her streets obscure / Sparkle and swarm with nothing true nor sure,”
This is another review in the vein of “I love the author but I quite like this book”. In this case, more specifically, it’s “I love a book by this author so much that its inky veins somehow run in mine, that I read it once a year at least and every time I notice something new, that its phrasing and insight sometimes shapes how I see a particular kind of landscape, or light, or expression on a face”–but this book I’m reviewing is not […]
Unexpectedly delightful
Like many of the books I read these days, I first heard of I Capture the Castle (1948) by Dodie Smith from a Cannonball Review (maybe Malin’s?). And I’m so glad I read it. It reminded me of a book with a big chunk of Anne of Green Gables mixed with a little Pride and Prejudice. It’s amazing that this book has just been sitting around, available, for over sixty years, and I had no idea. It’s similar to how I felt when I first […]