Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating:  
Summary: Great story!
Comment: I read the book and enjoyed it so much that I wanted to sit back and let someone else tell it to me.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Referring to classics doesn't make your book a classic.
Comment: The constant allusions to literary classics is irritating--it's almost as if the author thinks that mentioning these will elevate her work to the status of a classic as well. Not even half way through I felt like giving up. Her meandering, flowery prose becomes obnoxious at a certain point (Why should it take so long to get to some substance!). I gave this book two stars because I feel it's clear that the author can craft a sentence with some eloquence. However, the story is long-winded and over-the-top. The character of Margaret is so bogged down by self-pity that I started to find her annoyingly trite. As another reviewer noted, most of the characters in this book are one-dimensional. I suppose the grief each one of them feels is supposed to connect us to them, but in many ways it alienates the reader (it becomes such a ubiquitous theme that it suffocates the story). I found myself wishing someone would slap the characters out of their self-absorbed revelries so that I might discover if there was anything in their lives that made them worth living. In the end, it's still not clear to me if there was.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Stunning Literature
Comment: This book is the real deal. A wonderful story, masterfully told; a book that will be as good in 30 years as it is today; a piece of literature that will stand the test of time. Much has been written about the plot in other reviews so I won't repeat that, but this is a book for all readers who love books and appreciate a complex story, elegantly told. Much like a fine bottle of wine, it is to be savored.
Customer Rating:
Summary: A very well told story
Comment: `What succor, what consolation is there in truth, compared to a story?'
Vida Winter captured my heart from the very beginning.
Enthralling, fascinating tale; though a bit disturbing at times.
If one is in search of an intriguing fiction this is it!!!
Customer Rating:
Summary: Wonderful read
Comment: If you are someone who enjoys sitting by the fireplace and reading Jane Eyre, if you simply love literature and words, you will like this novel.
It is the story of a reclusive author who decides she finally wants an authorized biography. Her relationship with the author she picks for the job, the story she tells, and the author's own investigation of the truth of the story, this constitutes the plot.
Character development is excellent, as are the descriptions of the English countryside.
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