This was my January book club read, and man, I loved it. It takes place in the 19th century and focuses on a fourteen year old girl named Faith whose family is in the middle of a mysterious crisis. Her father is a minister and well-respected naturalist until an article accuses him of forgery, and he and his family are forced to flee England for the tiny island of Vane. Faith has long idolized her father and his work, and her attempts to discover the truth behind her family leaving England and her father's alleged misdeeds make up the first third of the novel, until an unexpected death turns the story into a murder mystery. And then we finally get to the lie tree at the heart of it all.
This was the sort of book that I liked a lot for most of it, and then the final five pages turned it into a book I loved; everything that I had found frustrating or that had made me angry pays off, in the end, and it left me wanting nothing. It was a fascinating book to read after having read Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything, in part because the conflicts within the upper class scientific community in the novel echoed the actual history so closely that it made it super easy for me to buy into the more fantastical elements of the story. It managed to feel both totally grounded in reality and just out of focus enough to make the mystery ring true. I would categorize this book as historical magical realism YA, which is a mouthful but anything less wouldn't quite capture it all. A fantastic story, beautifully written and beautifully told.
Grade: A
This was the sort of book that I liked a lot for most of it, and then the final five pages turned it into a book I loved; everything that I had found frustrating or that had made me angry pays off, in the end, and it left me wanting nothing. It was a fascinating book to read after having read Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything, in part because the conflicts within the upper class scientific community in the novel echoed the actual history so closely that it made it super easy for me to buy into the more fantastical elements of the story. It managed to feel both totally grounded in reality and just out of focus enough to make the mystery ring true. I would categorize this book as historical magical realism YA, which is a mouthful but anything less wouldn't quite capture it all. A fantastic story, beautifully written and beautifully told.
Grade: A
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