Novelish

ISBN: 0307238512 | Pages: 338 (hardcover)

The two things that drew me most to Katharine McMahon’s novel were the cover (besides an attractive image, there’s no shortage of gold foil) and the title (which, well, sounded interesting). Not the best way to judge a book, is it? But I figured I had nothing to lose if I read the library’s copy.

So, where to start?

In eighteenth-century England, protagonist Emilie Selden lives in a secluded country house and studies natural philosophy with her father - but, consequently, knows next to nothing about basic human emotions. When Emilie is nineteen, she falls in love with a man called Aislabie, who shows up abruptly one day. The plot marches on for the next three hundred pages or so, and it’s not without a few unexpected twists.

It was an okay book overall, if perhaps not as good as I’d expected. It’s fairly short and fast-paced, and while lots of people would love that, I prefer long stuff. I liked the writing itself well enough - none of it struck me as exceptionally beautiful, but certainly not bad. And the references to Sir Isaac Newton amused me, because I’m accustomed to him as a character in Neal Stephenson’s Quicksilver.

I think the biggest problem with it is that to understand Emilie’s actions, I had to constantly remind myself of the time period and of her ignorance in certain areas. For example, early on when Aislabie rapes her - then asks her to marry him - she goes right on obsessing over him. (”I want to marry him, baby or not,” she tells Mrs Gill the housekeeper at one point.)

Throughout the rest of the book - even up to the very end, though I won’t spoil the ending by going into that - there were times when I had to ask myself, “What the hell was she thinking?!” But perhaps I’m only finding it difficult to accept because I haven’t read enough historical fiction of this sort.