Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell – Susanna Clarke

Read for the R.I.P II reading challenge.

I very much enjoyed this book, despite the fact that it took me forever to get through it. I’m a pretty fast reader, so it doesn’t often take me 20 days to finish reading something.

I was somewhat reminded of my (high school) freshman attempt to read Les Miserables (because surely anything that was made into a musical would be interesting), at least in terms of historic scope. However, what made this book infinitely more enjoyable than Les Miserables is that the author has struck upon the balance of just enough detail to make the world of the book engrossing, rather than overburdened with exposition and unnecessary back story.

I loved the magical background of this book. I want the Raven King to be real. This fictional version of England sounded so interesting. I actually found myself wondering at one point what fun it would be to see how the magic world of this book would function in our current timeframe.

I was also rather impressed that the story lines managed to merge together so well at the end. I confess at the very beginning being a little concerned by the number of seemingly different plot threads she seemed to be trying to bring into the story, but I was happy to hit a point where I realized they weren’t so unconnected after all.

I feel like I should be writing more to reflect the length of this book, but I confess that I’m happy to be done, and happy to move on to other things.