This is definitely one of the top three most beautiful books I have read this year. Not only is it well written, but it is well researched and really makes you think without making you struggle to do so. As I haven’t read any of the award winners for which this book was nominated, I can’t say my theory holds that the nominees are generally better than the winners, but that’s still my gut response.
Not that you would want to, because the book is fairly deceptively complicated, but if you had to sum it up in one line it would be the following:
“Sometimes you had to be who you were and endure what happened to you, and to you alone, before you could understand the first thing about it.” (67)
This is definitely one of the themes of the book, along with acceptance and surviving and any other number of things. And it doesn’t just have to do with Wayne/Annabel, but with Thomasina, Wally, Jacinta, and Treadway. And any of the other countless people who lived in Croydon Harbor and are survivors.
I want to like Dickens—I really do. The only problem is that I’m convinced if he had a better editor these books would have been BEYOND amazing. The same thing happened while reading Great Expectations to me while reading 
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I knew very little about Charles Dickens going into reading A Tale of Two Cities. Seriously, the most I know I’ve got from either The Muppets version of A Christmas Carol or the Doctor Who episode from a few years ago. (Yay Gwen!) I am glad, however, that I’m reading two of Dickens’ greatest most well-known novels this year as it is his 200th birthday! What better year to read it than on such an occasion?