Rating: 
Summary: An excellent, breath-taking read!!
Review: Although not of the same era, Elizabeth Bowen's The Death of the Heart brings to mind the work of Jane Austen. This literary masterpiece, written in the Modern Period (during or immediately after World War I), centers around an adolescent girl's "coming of age" in an era of many questions and precious few answers. The brilliance of this novel is the linking of the familiar novel format to a Virginia Woolf-like stream of conciousness style of writing. I've recommended this book to many a bibliophile and never have had it fail to make an impact on the reader
Rating: 
Summary: One of the best books of the twentieth century
Review: An extraordinary book--far and away Bowen's best, and one of the most perfectly constructed novels of all time. Perhaps its most astonishing achievement is to show not only the devastating effects of experience upon innocence but also the seriously alarming and equally destructive effects true innocence can have in a world of experience. Anna's sophistication and coolness make her no less vulnerable than the fifteen year-old Portia, and I don't think anybody who's read it can ever forget Anna's great speech at the end of the novel about how she would feel if she were Portia, or the famous scene with Portia discovering she's been betrayed in the movie theater. It's also a very funny book: the sequences with Mrs. Heccomb and her children at Waikiki are hilarious. I heartily recommend this novel.
Rating:
Summary: Cat in a bag
Review: Bowen is quite plainly superb in her observation of her characters and their surroundings, noting with precision tiny gestures and details that cut straight to the heart. Her description of Portia 'hanging her head like a cat in a bag waiting to drown' (I paraphrase as I do not have the book in front of me) says everything (and is uncannyly similar to a Verve lyric in Bitter Sweet Syphony! .. so be it). Read this book. Read it carefully.
Rating: 
Summary: NEWSFLASH:
Review: Elizabeth Bowen was a sadist. Read this book if you like torture.
Rating:
Summary: Mystifying prose
Review: I don't know what those who called this Bowen masterpiece "boring" expected of this novel. Perhaps they hoped for a simple, bland, beach-blanket novel they could skim in a day. I'm sure they were disappointed to find that this is an intense, at times intellectually difficult novel to read. Bowen's descriptions of the inner workings of an adolescent girl often require a second or third reading. This is not because her writing is dull or too enigmatic; it is because Bowen materializes the thoughts of an unconscious mind, thoughts that for some are difficult to understand because we do not realize we have them until they are before us on a white page. This is the genius of this novel; the poignancy of it is not in the plot but in Bowen's subtle display of humanity. This is not so much a novel as a psychological study, and it is brilliant. The simple-minded need not apply.
Rating:
Summary: They're both right
Review: I found this book very difficult to read in that I felt horrible for the character Portia. How foolish can a sensible person be? Having said that, it means that the book was written in a way to hold my interest.
Rating:
Summary: blah
Review: i thought it sucked. it was boring and didnt catch my interest whatsoever.
Rating: 
Summary: Not for everyone
Review: It is a good book,but I found it depressing...
Rating: 
Summary: huh?
Review: Portia is an orphaned 16 year old girl sent to live with her half-brother and his wife. They aren't very nice to Portia. She "falls in love" with a friend of her brother's wife. He rejects her. It turns out the wife has been reading Portia's diary. Portia throws herself at another friend of the family. He too
rejects her. Everyone realizes they've been buzzardly. Whoopty flippin' doo... This is supposed to be a poignant portrait of a young girl coming of age; read To Kill a Mockingbird instead.
Rating:
Summary: They're both right
Review: The reviewers who have come before me have variously praised this fine book, and called Elizabeth Bowen a sadist. Quite so. This book has the suicidal weariness of Brideshead Revisited, and a protagonist that you'd like to shake some sense into, a la Of Human Bondage. That said, both the prose and the dialogue are pure pleasure to read. If you find this book a downer, cleanse your palate with I Capture The Castle, the flip side of this story.
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