Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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33 of 34 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
I Write This Sitting In The Kitchen Sink, 4 Feb 2003
A great opening line, an imaginative structure and an artless narrator all make this novel a really enjoyable read.The settings and characters are well drawn and memorable. Mortmain and Topaz in particular are lightly but clearly sketched to good effect. The author, through the character of Cassandra, compares her story on several occassions to Jane Austen's and the Bronte's works. Although surely tongue in cheek, this comparison is not unwarranted. The unhurried descriptions of people and place are similar in many ways to Eighteenth Century novels with their slow, dense plots rather light on action and with solidly constucted background worlds. Unlike these classic works, "I Capture The Castle" is supposedly a children's book, but the protagonists are about the same age as the Bennett sisters and the total of graphically described "adult" material is the same in this work as in an Austen novel...i.e. there is none. So, this novel is a "Pride and Prejudice" for the Twentieth Century: of its time but timeless, serious but funny, involving and beautifully written. There can surely be no higher praise. Now, if I can just get this tap to stop dripping on my keyboard.
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40 of 42 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
An absorbing, must-have book for any advanced teenage reader, 17 Mar 2002
Dodie Smith is world renowned for writing 101 Dalmatians and The Starlight Barking, but her deep and expressive writing talent is revealed in I Capture The Castle, which was written in 1949 and is set in 1930s Britain. I think that you can tell if a book is good or not, by whether it has that magical touch- you're suddenly jolted back to life and you realise that you were there, that you were a spectator on this world of fiction. I Capture The Castle indeed has this rare power, and I longed for little snippets of time in which I could let myself be transported through the pages of this creation. As you read you can smell the smells, speak the words, and feel the atmosphere. You get to know the characters, and you start to discover their natures through the narrative. The book is a set of three diaries written by the seventeen year old character of Cassandra Mortmain, expressing her perspective on her slightly eccentric family, life, and love. Her family consists of her father who is a writer and is portrayed as being mad, her step-mother, Topaz, who models for nude paintings and communes with nature, and her elder twenty-one year old sister Rose, who is beautiful but unfortunately vain and bored with her life. Lastly there is Stephen Colly, a gardener-boy who has, in effect, been adopted into the family, and who is madly in love with Cassandra. The reason that I chose this book for my review is that it is so captivating. It is a book that is simply impossible to put down and leaves you feeling that you want to start all over again and re-live the story.
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26 of 27 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Wonderful, life-affirming, beautifully written, 8 Jul 1999
By A Customer
I hate when books are hyped out of proportion but, in this case, believe the hype. I rarely react to a book so strongly that it leaves me with a pleasant glow days after I have read it. Magically, this book manages to be the warmest, most positive, least cloying story I have ever read (even the end is satisfying without being a cop-out). It is beautifully written with an amazing sense of place, atmosphere and character. Who couldn't fall in love with Cassandra with her quick wit, intelligence and unconventional outlook? I have rarely read such an unpatronising, accurate and positive account of a girl on the brink of adulthood. Read ICTC for the cleverly constructed plot. Read it for the descriptive passages and the evocation of time and place. Read it for the distinctive and endearingly eccentric characters, especially the narrator, Cassandra. Just read it. And don't think you have to be a woman to love this book. I am a guy in his late twenties who intends to pass on my copy of the book to most of my friends - male and female - under the strict condition that it is returned in mint condition!
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