

Loading... Affinity (1999)by Sarah Waters
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Best Historical Fiction (135) » 23 more Books With a Twist (10) Best LGBT Fiction (17) Unreliable Narrators (41) Top Five Books of 2013 (1,041) Books Read in 2013 (92) Female Author (314) Top Five Books of 2017 (498) Books Read in 2015 (1,628) Ghosts (86) LGBTQIA Horror (109) Romans (44) No current Talk conversations about this book. Well-written, engaging, and with a plot twist at the very end to satisfy. I enjoyed this so much more than Tipping The Velvet. Less sex, to be sure (i.e. no sex), but also less blatant Victorian lesbian erotica copying. ( ![]() Not as good as Fingersmith or Tipping the Velvet. Tipping the Velvet is really the best book she has written. taylor The setting is London in the year 1874. Margaret Prior, a young woman from a wealthy family, has decided to become a “Lady Visitorâ€ù to the women’s ward at Millbank Prison. She is a deeply unhappy person, grief-stricken by her father’s death and bristling under life with her overbearing mother. The hope is that her charity-work will help with her recovery from a suicide attempt. Margaret meets with the usual thieves and prostitutes but is particularly drawn to an enigmatic prisoner named Selina Dawes. Selina, she learns, is a spiritualist serving time after her last séance resulted in the death of her benefactress. Margaret gradually becomes obsessed with Selina and convinced of her innocence. As we read her increasingly desperate journal entries, we see Margaret cast the young woman as her savior, and herself as Selina’s. Sarah Waters’ characters do silly things, selfish things, and even cruel things. But there is usually some redeeming quality that stops me from hating them entirely. Unfortunately the main character here is such a dipshit that I could not bring myself to care about her. At all. Just a disclaimer here, I do understand what a serious condition depression is. However, Margaret is the kind of person who wants everyone to be as miserable as she is. For instance, she insists on wearing mourning clothes at her sister's wedding. That has nothing to do with depression and everything to do with being a bitch. I also disliked that the story boiled down to belief vs. skepticism. Either you think Selina is the real deal, or you think she is a con artist and spend the entire book waiting for the big reveal. Waters tries to keep it ambiguous by including excerpts from Selina’s own journal, but I found these passages unnecessary as well as illogical. Over 50% in basically nothing has happened and there's no trajectory or sense of where it's going. no reviews | add a review
Belongs to Publisher SeriesEuropese literatuurcollectie (dl. 8)
"An upper-class woman recovering from a suicide attempt, Margaret Prior has begun visiting the women's ward of Millbank prison, Victorian London's grimmest jail, as part of her rehabilitative charity work. Amongst Millbank's murderers and common thieves, Margaret finds herself increasingly fascinated by one apparently innocent inmate, the enigmatic spiritualist Selina Dawes. Selina was imprisoned after a seance she was conducting went horribly awry, leaving an elderly matron dead and a young woman profoundly disturbed. Although initially skeptical of Selina's gifts, Margaret is soon drawn into a twilight world of ghosts and shadows, unruly spirits and unseemly passions, until she is at last driven to concoct a desperate plot to secure Selina's freedom, and her own."--Jacket. No library descriptions found.
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![]() GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)823.914 — Literature English {except North American} English fiction Modern Period 1901-1999 1945-1999LC ClassificationRatingAverage:![]()
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