The Observations
The Observations is a hugely assured and darkly funny debut set in nineteenth-century Scotland. Bessy Buckley, the novel?s heroine, is a cynical, wide-eyed, and tender fifteen-year-old Irish girl who takes a job as a maid in a once-grand country house outside Edinburgh, where all is not as it...
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The Observations is a hugely assured and darkly funny debut set in nineteenth-century Scotland. Bessy Buckley, the novel?s heroine, is a cynical, wide-eyed, and tender fifteen-year-old Irish girl who takes a job as a maid in a once-grand country house outside Edinburgh, where all is not as it seems. Asked by her employer, the beautiful Arabella, to keep a journal of her most intimate thoughts, Bessy soon makes a troubling discovery and realizes that she has fled her difficult past only to arrive in an even more disturbing present.
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Format: paperback
ISBN:
9780143112013 (0143112015)
ASIN: 143112015
Publish date: June 27th 2007
Publisher: Penguin
Pages no: 406
Edition language: English
Category:
Novels,
Literature,
European Literature,
British Literature,
Cultural,
Historical Fiction,
Adult,
Mystery,
Contemporary,
19th Century,
Gothic,
Scotland,
Victoriana
I picked up The Observations, by Jane Harris, because I adored Gillespie and I. I love unreliable narrators, because I get so much more story to pick apart. But reading Gillespie and I didn't prepare me for The Observations. I finished the book and realized I had been lied to—in the best ways possib...
Great fun. I love it when an author plays with a distinctive narrative voice, and this certainly qualifies. (There's also a brief section with another voice, the other female protagonist, who is the one doing the "observations" of her maid Bessy). Bessy actually made me laugh out loud several times,...
I enjoyed this, but I couldn't help feeling I was missing something. It was marketed as the next "Fingersmith", which it plainly isn't, being much more about the humour than the intrigue. I wasn't convinced by some of the dialogue either, it seemed a bit too modern for the time in which it was set. ...
I really enjoyed "The Observations" the narrator Bessy a young Irish girl forced into prostitution by her mother runs away and is taken in by the "Missus" Arabella Reid and becomes her maid. The two form a rather bizarre friendship with Bessy obsessively attached to the Missus, understandably consid...
NO SPOILERS!!!On completions:This is primarily a crime/mystery novel. Usually when I read fictional crime novels I cannot but loose interest b/c I KNOW this is all just one big story; there is no reality to it. Well, not with this book. I found it thoroughly entertaining. A light, fun read. As I poi...
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