I picked up this book because I was visiting the house the story was based on. Sadly, the tour of the house was a lot more interesting than the story. It started out great, the history behind the house and Colonel Pyncheon's death drew me in, which is why I settled on 3 stars. Hawthorne wrote a good...
Several years ago, I went on a trip to Salem, Massachusetts and right as we were getting on the airplane my best friend's mom gave me a copy of The House of the Seven Gables by Nathaniel Hawthorne. You might be completely confused about why this would be the best reading material for a quick airplan...
I had never read a thing by Herman Melville and couldn't have told you anything he wrote except for Moby Dick before I took a class about him. I've really come to enjoy his writing. If all you've experienced of Melville is Moby-Dick, you might be surprised by his other writings. This book is a st...
This is a book of scholarly essays relating the writings of Frederick Douglass and Herman Melville. I had never related these two writers to each other until I had a class about them this semester. I'm still not sure they relate as well as some scholars would like to think they do but both writers ...
Nathaniel Hawthorne's gripping psychological drama... You see, books tend to lose their "grip" on their readers when character deaths are drawn out for nearly 20 pages, or whole chapters are devoted to describing a garden or Phoebe's bedroom or the sunshine or the cent-shop. So essentially, the read...
Nothing at all like what I was expecting. Why was I led to believe this was Gothic horror? It's not. Perhaps pinning down what it is, is the problem. Gothic? You do get that feeling of morbid attractiveness, cheerless gloom. The characters are dusty and melancholy, apart from the fresh faced Phoebe....
Pure Melville, even if he did only write it for a paycheck.
Set in the mid-nineteenth century, The House of The Seven Gables tells the story of the Pyncheon family. Descended from a Puritan ancestor who was involved in the witch trials of the seventeenth century, the remaining members of the family now live under a curse and the plot of this novel is concern...
This book began a little slow and the romance seemed unlikely and unrealistic. However, Hawthorne was wonderful in many of his descriptions of the characters, the house and the train ride. My favorite chapter was about "Governor" Pyncheon and all the plans he had made for his future. These plans ...
The House of the Seven Gables begins with a preface by the author that identifies the work as a romance, not a novel. That may be the author's preference, but I think most romance fans will be disappointed if they read this book. The book is a classic by a famous American author, so it deserves to...
Log in with Facebook 
