The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox (2006)

I loved this book. We were given the broad brush-strokes of an agonizing past, of a heart-wrenching family story. It was not over-written: it hit an interesting balance of being a fast, easy read and a challenge at times to follow. It is not perfect, but the characters and the plot are so well drawn, I was willing to overlook the small lapses. Highly recommended.


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You can see the full review here, http://www.icewarmth.com/2011/05/book-review-vanishing-act-of-esme.html . ( )

3.5 stars. A very quick read. Sometimes a bit hard to read but once you get used to it you cannot stop reading. Yes there are still many questions left when you've finished it. It is not a book with all the lose ends neatly tied. To the contrary but I liked it that way. It could have been a bit longer. i wanted to know more about what happened in India but all in all I did enjoy this quick read. ( )

Satisfactory. ( )

I liked it--sad, but good story! ( )

A fairly quick read. I wasn't sure what to expect, especially as I started it. It was an interesting story, that I should have been able to predict, but for some reason didn't. I wish it had been a bit longer with more of the story. It felt like a short story that had been expanded, but not to its full potential. As unsatisfied as I was with the story, I found myself really enjoying the characters. ( )

I can't say much without ruining this book. It's just over 200 pages long and a lot of it is jumbled diary entries but the ending is great and all I have to say is this: What a bitch! ( )

14/03/13 1 of 19 books for $10

I figured out the dark secret pretty early on, but there were still some twists I did not expect. ( )

My blog post about this book is at this link. ( )

I'm not sure that any review can actually do this book justice. It is emotionally powerful and powerfully heartbreaking, such a short book to convey so much emotion and so much depth. Hard to believe there was a time when a young girl or wife or mother could be committed to a psychiatric institute indefinitely just on the say so of a doctor, a mother,a jealous sister, a father or a husband. But there was. The writing in this book is deceptively simple and oh so elegant. The characters real and complete, using flashbacks and memories. The ending a reversal and for me, perfect. ( )

Loved Esme and the history of the treatment of "mentally ill" women once upon a time. The rest of it didn't quite work for me. ( )

Great read as in well written story with fresh plot full of twists. Reflection of women's status in class society - follow the rules....or else. Highly recommend. ( )

I was given this book for free by my HR manager for World Book Night. An interesting read, centred around a woman who has lived most of her life in a mental health institution. As an old woman and with the closure of the hospital they are trying to get her niece to take her to live with her. The niece had never known that her Grandmother had a sister and the book is about the woman's (Esme) life before she was put into the institution. It had one of those endings that leaves you wondering what actually happened and not knowing what will happen next, I think this is something some people really like about the book, but I prefer books to have a proper ending! ( )

This remarkable little novel tells the story of Esme Lennox, who is committed to a psychiatric hospital at the age of 16 by her parents. But Esme is not insane, merely strong-willed and uninterested in the kind of life that is expected of her as an upper-class female in the 1930s. Completely rejected by her family, she languishes in the hospital for 61 years, and is only released, to the care of a great-niece who never even previously knew of Esme, when the hospital finally closes. As Esme and her niece Iris spend their first few days together, the disturbing history of their family is slowly revealed to both of them.

O’Farrell’s book is masterfully plotted and beautifully written: virtually impossible to put down. ( )

This book really drew me in and I found it to be a very quick read. It is a well-constructed story that balances several storylines and pulls things to a clever conclusion. The writing is very straightforward which helps maintain the pace but won't win any awards. Overall, however, I found it an enjoyable read for a rainy weekend. ( )

This is the amazing, enraging, heartbreaking story of three women: Esme who has been placed in an asylum over 60 years ago when she was 16, her sister Kit who has Alzheimer and her granddaughter Iris, a young woman. It's only when the asylum closes that Iris finds out about her lost family-member. Little by little, through intertwining dialogues, we find out what's really happened to Esme.
The parallels and differences between the characters whose lives evolve in a different time-frame, are striking and thought-provoking.
I sometimes like to place the characters from different books with similar themes together and compare them. In this case, I joined the main characters of The Awakening by Kate Chopin and The Yellow Wall-paper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman which I both read last year. Although they are not similar, if you like one of these, you'll probably like the other ones too. Highly recommended if you like a short, but thoughtful read with a serious theme. ( )

Two sisters, one ends in a mental institution

Iris is a woman living a normal, but complicated life. She’s having an affair with a married man and has a close relationship with her step-brother Alex. Everything in her world is thrown completely off balance when she finds out her great-aunt Esme, who she didn’t know existed, has been in a mental institution for 60 years.

The narrative flips the POV between Iris in present day, Esme as a young woman and an elderly woman and Esme’s sister Kitty. This works beautifully, giving us small pieces of the puzzle as we go. Because of this style I don’t know if I would have liked this one if I hadn’t read it in one sitting. Reading it that way was perfect because as it flipped back and forth in time I could just stay in the midst of everything and keep it all straight.

The book is really about women and the way “mental illness” was treated in the past. I’ve always been interested in that and so Vanishing appealed to me. Iris’ plot wasn’t as important to me, but I thought Esme was fascinating. It’s terrifying to think about how misunderstood women sometimes were. A strong will was often treated like a disease and the women were often powerless to defend themselves. There are many other books that touch on this issue; both Fingersmith and The Woman in White come to mind.

SPOILERS

I’ve heard a few people say they aren’t sure about the details of the ending. Did Esme kill Kitty? Was Esme really Iris’ grandmother? To those questions I would say yes and yes, at least that’s how I took it. Does anyone who has read it have a different opinion?

SPOILERS OVER

“We are all just vessels through which identities pass: we are features, gestures, habits, then we hand them on. Nothing is our own. We begin in the world as anagrams of our ancestors.”

BOTTOM LINE: An incredible look at the disturbing ease in which women were shuffled off to an insane asylum only a few decades ago. If at all possible, read this whole book at one time. It’s a quick read, but I can see how the POV would be confusing if you were picking it up and putting it down. ( )

p.porter.: Has anyone ever read a well written book? If you have, I would not read this one. Editing is nonexistant. The end? Who knows. I truly hate being confused at the end of anything I have spent my time reading.

Were she not fiction, one could weep and weep over Esme. Her parents, from Scotland, bearing the formidable climate of India, losing baby after baby, have no patience for Esme's strange-ness. Yet Esme is the only one in the family who acknowledges her feelings and thoughts. Her parents and sister, Kitty, despair of trying to get her to follow the stilted code of society. When, in the course of events, Esme needs her family more than ever, she is instead shunted off to a mental institution, where she molders for over sixty years, while the family pretend that she never was. When the institution closes its doors, Kitty's granddaughter, Iris, receives a call about a relative that she never knew existed.

This book provided a glimpse into life in colonial India, a glimpse into life in a mental institution, a glimpse into high society strictures in Scotland. It was all interesting enough that I wished for more than just glimpses. The author uses Kitty's Alzheimers to advance her clues bit by bit through snatches of Kitty's disjointed thoughts. Not sure what I think about that; it almost seemed like an easy-out way to move the story.

Taken as a whole, though, I found this to be a good book with interesting, believable characters, a setting adequately portrayed, and a good story. ( )

Woman lost in a psychiatric unit. Quite good.

This book was odd most of the way through, and ended in an odd manner, but I really did enjoy it. The weirdness didn't seem forced; it seemed to just be a telling of a rather bizarre family story. ( )

I very much enjoyed reading this book - until its ending. How can a book be so good and then leave its readers so puzzled with the situation of its characters so unresolved? I guess we, the readers, could script our own ending.

This is the story of Iris Lockhart, a young Scottish woman who makes the discovery that she has a great aunt, Esme Lennox, who is being released from a psychiatric facility after sixty-one years. It is up to Iris to determine what will become of her great aunt.

The narrative unwinds in lovely prose, telling the story of the great aunt's childhood with her proper parents who return to Scotland from India and her sister Kitty who feels superior in all ways to Esme. This is interwoven with Iris's own story of a conflicted relationship with a married man. As the reader has no idea in which direction the story will go, this becomes quite the mesmerizing tale. Despite my disappointment with its ending, I did enjoy my experience of reading this novel and think it well worth recommending to others. ( )

With all the great reviews I wanted to like this but I missed the point somewhere - I had to push my way through it and probably would not have bothered except for its a book club choice. The actual premise was great (which is why it gets 2 stars) but there were too many unfinished threads to the stories, I thought the POV was interesting but somehow I just could not find a place in the novel to anchor. It was achingly slow at the beginning. I thought the POV was interesting (if easy to get jumbled at times) but somehow I just could not find a place in it. ( )