The House on Fortune Street

I love Livesey's language and sentences, but this book lacks focus.

Full review at Perpetual Folly.

Livesey is exploring the disconnect the exists between our unstated private desires and feelings and the desires/feelings we choose to present to the world and the harm it does. Using four different characters (each one connected to a British author - Keats, Lewis Carroll, Charlotte Bronte/Virginia Woolf, and Charles Dickens - who know each other she explores the assumptions they (and we as readers) make and the consequences of those assumptions. I thought is was an extremely skillful book, that easily avoids pathos despite an incident that would lend itself to such a presentation. Now, all I have to do is figure out who I want to give the book to so I can talk to them about it!