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Rating: 
Summary: What Maisie Knew.....Do I Really Care?
Review: I am not a Henry James fanatic, as a matter of fact, this is the first work of his that I have read, and with that I must say that this novel is horribly written and completely unrealistic in it's portrayal of the child, Maisie and especially her dialogue. I have been assigned to read this for an english class as an undergrad and I have tolerated many a badly executed idea...but never like this. Boring, boring, and more boring. And as a result, I am comnpletely turned off to James other works. I hear his other works are great.....read those first, you may fair better.
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Summary: Murky and weird
Review: I don't regret having read this book, but I wouldn't recommend it to anyone who isn't already into Henry James. The style is hard to understand, apparently because it was dictated, and the subject matter is even more obscure. I don't think Henry James had much experience with children: even assuming that Maisie is twisted by her strange situation, she doesn't talk like any child I know or can imagine. Weird moral undercurrents and jealousy take up most, if not all, of the novel. I wouldn't take claims of this book's modernity too seriously - it's more on the byzantine side. Read The Europeans instead: so much more fun!
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Summary: Nasty, funny, and searing
Review: I have not read any other James, except for Daisy Miller over 20 years ago, but picked this up on a friend's recommendation.
Yes, you do have to read this book slower than most novels, but it is well worth it. It is a sharp, dark, and devastating satire on how adult use children. Each character that Maisie encounters uses her as a prop to meet their own emotional needs--any affection they give her is purely secondary.
Perhaps many people do not like this book because it is so relentlessly dark. As the book goes on and Maisie is more and more aware of by the coldness around her the same behavior that makes the reader snicker in the first chapters becomes painful.
If you are looking for a escapist period novel--skip this one. If you want something more probing--this is well worth picking up.
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Summary: .
Review: I read this about 10 years ago, had to write a paper for it in college. I remember the first ~200 pages being excruciating, then the last 40 or so transforming the novel for me (for the positive). It's in the end where the themes really came together for me; it might not be a coincidence this is when Maisie really begins to emerge as an active character. Throughout the novel she passively absorbs the actions of her bourgeois parents, step-parents, their lovers, etc. Then, finally, she tries to apply what she understands, through the filter of her consciousness (and imagination), and becomes a participant in the intrigues and romances floating about her. She doesn't understand it's not her time; the object of her affections is cynical and weak, but not debauched, and in fact she is the aggressor. He tries to guide the burgeoning light of her consciousness as best he can. In the end I thought the novel was a lovely story about a child's encounter with the wall of possibility, the reconcilation of imagination with human limits.
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Summary: Murky and weird
Review: I think this is the most modern of Henry James' stories. Young Maisie's parents divorce and then seem to spend their lives using her to get a teach other, until they develop other interests. Sadly, the story resonates today - immature, self-centered parents and the children that they create. Henry James' insight into the life of such a child is brilliant.
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Summary: A Modern James' Story
Review: I think this is the most modern of Henry James' stories. Young Maisie's parents divorce and then seem to spend their lives using her to get a teach other, until they develop other interests. Sadly, the story resonates today - immature, self-centered parents and the children that they create. Henry James' insight into the life of such a child is brilliant.
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Summary: Tedium, thy name is Maisie
Review: I'd read The Ambassadors, Portrait of a Lady, and a bunch of short stories - and I flipped through two introductions that said that this was perhaps one of James's most succesful works, so I picked it up.What I discovered is that those introduction writers are crazy. This book is incredibly boring. It is, of course, well-written, and there are no parts that I can identify as specifically bad - but it fails to live, it fails to arouse any interest. Despite a surprisingly lurid and eventful plot, with people changing partners all the time, none of the characters ever feel really THERE. Maybe it's because the adults are the genuine focus of the book, with Maisie just the hub around which they spin, and using her perspective was too limiting: James is best when he can fluidly illuminate the consciousness of one character after another, and there's only so much of that you can do through a child's eyes. We get the irony of knowing more about the corrupt adults around Maisie that she does, but this doesn't really allow for a full exploration of anyone. All of this would be tolerable if we at least had a sense of Maisie, if we had a real sense of being inside a child's mind. But the star of this book is by far the least convincing little girl in the history of literature. Which means that her perspective never feels real either. It sinks the whole book. I can't think of another great writer, actually, that would be less suited to depict the world of a child than James: immediacy, physicality, animality are the words that come to mind when I think of the way children live, and they're the last words I would associate with HJ. Tolstoy and Dickens are at one end of the spectrum and he's at another. Don't bother plowing through this one: pretty much everything else is better.
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Summary: What I Know: This Book is Literary Torture
Review: Never mind the thickets of subordinate clauses. Henry James could look at ugly situations and use them as a means to explore human nature. Written about a century ago when divorce was rare, the novel deals with a little girl whose value to her appalling parents is as a weapon to use against each other. If that wasn't bad enough, nearly everyone who shows the child some kindness has a reason for doing so other than her welfare. What makes this other than pathetic is Maisie herself. She watches the adult's grim game of musical spouses with utter clarity. She may not understand everything she sees, but she is without illusions. She observes, she watches, she copes. Mrs Wix is appalled by Maisie's acceptance of her stepparent's adultery. What Mrs Wix doesn't understand is that Maisie has no conception of conventional morality. How could she? It certainly makes for an interesting protagonist. Maisie may be a strange little girl, but it is because she has lived a strange little life. Shs is more a miniature woman than a little girl because the twisted adults around her have stolen her childhood. In this, James was prophetic of what we have done to our children since he penned this novel at the dawn of the twentieth century.
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Summary: Another unique study by James
Review: While this novel is a less popular work than some of the author's others, it should not be dismissed as a minor one. James' prose is refreshingly complex - a true balm in these illiterate times - and his narrative bears his distinctive creative style.
Maisie is somewhat different in style from James' other works, but this is not a lapse in quality but rather a testament to his versatility as an author - he was not stuck in one particular mould. The choice of subject matter is fairly unique - I don't know of any other novels that deal with these topics in quite the same way. Social mores may have changed since James' time, but the way children are effected by such events remains the same. The story is narrated, but we see the events unfold through the child's eyes. The numerous dialogues between Maisie and her various adults portray brilliantly the veiled manner in which children are spoken to about 'inappropriate' subjects, and the vague scarcity of key details which a child should not be allowed to know is left to the reader to be unraveled. In this unraveling the reader is given a tangible sense of the child's confusion, her struggle to comprehend these unexplained happenings with her lack of definite information. It is James' intention that the reader should share in this confusion - that there should be some struggle to piece together what is occuring out of the direct line of sight. This helps to create a connection between the reader and the little heroine.
Some criticize the novel for its consistantly dark tone - but this is hardly a basis on which to assign value to the work (or any work for that matter). Furthermore, what other tone could the novel have? This is after all an exploration of a group of supposed adults behaving very badly indeed towards a helpless child. The moral qualms are not all rooted in the Victorian age, many remain just as topical today as then - which is in itself quite an achievement.
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