A love story to make you smile. I thoroughly enjoyed reading Agnes Grey and although it was somewhat predictable, I felt it was well written and worthy of its place in the Brontë compendium. (Not the right word, someone help me!)
Reading Agnes Grey has even inspired me to follow it up with The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, Anne’s second novel. Agnes Grey counts for both my Mount TBR Challenge (13 of 25 – 52%) and The Classics Club (3 of 85 – 4%).
Let’s start with the end. I rarely leave the last line of a novel uncovered because it might hint at something, but this one doesn’t reveal anything and it was so finite that it just made me laugh and truly appreciate the way in which Anne Brontë wrote the novel.
“And now I think I have said sufficient.”
The finiteness of this line is perfect. It doesn’t allow for conversation or for interpretation – it says what it means and closes the novel succinctly. I feel as if I should close all of my email sand blog posts with said line, as it’s so cheeky and yet, somewhat humorously, sufficient.
Well I survived the slog. At points I honestly didn’t think I would get through the novel and really should have waited having just finished the five books of Martin’s epic saga, but I did and I didn’t. It took me nearly three weeks to read the novel (which, yes I know, isn’t a lot of time for some people – but it was never-ending for me), and they were three very long weeks.
So far of the books my boss lent me last September this is by far my favorite. Although I enjoyed Donoghue’s 
If you have ever been spurned in love, then you know exactly what the unnamed narrator of After Delores is going through. And over the four months of the book she goes through a lot and most (if not all) of it is somehow connected to Delores. This book counts as number 10 of 25 for the 
If I had a ranking system for the novels I read and it was based on beauty, Snow Falling on Cedars would definitely be towards the top of that list. It has to take an amazing writer/wordsmith to make me want to live on a small island off the coast of Washington State and take up farming of some sort. I read this book for my Books into Movies book group at the local library and I am VERY glad I did. I plan on watching the movie later this evening or tomorrow.