Fingersmith

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Summary: Makes me want to read more Sarah Waters
Review: This book was quite good and makes me eager to read her other novels. Waters accurately captures the seedier side of Victorian England--the pickpockets and fences, erotic book dealers and collectors, madhouses and inmates--in a richly complex novel that starts out slow but becomes un-put-downable at the end of Part 1. The characters are well-written; the dialogue seems real; the intrigue is engrossing. Unlike much of the trite, stereotypical works that pass for "good" lesbian fiction, Waters manages to write three dimensional lovers facing realistic obstacles to be together. Waters even manages to pay a certain amount of homage to Victorian erotica--where the lesbian novel got its start by tittilating repressed men--by taking the themes that one comes across in such novels (bad girls vs. good girls who always seem to come under the power of very bad men, etc.) and turning them into something realistic. This is a gritty novel that evokes the underside of the Victorian era in all its sensual reality.

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Summary: Didn't want it to end
Review: Waters is an incredible writer. A well-crafted and extremely engaging story.

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Summary: A genuinely sensational contemporary "sensation novel"
Review: Since John Fowles's THE FRENCH LIEUTENANT'S WOMEN three decades ago many British novelists have tried to recapture the style and feel of the great pageturners from the novel's heyday, the Victorian era, often with mixed results. Sarah Waters, like Charles Palliser, has carved out a career for herself almost wholly in this subgenre, and succeeds even more brilliantly than Palliser. Her latest novel, FINGERSMITH, beautifully recaptures the can't-put-it-down excitement of her literary forerunner Wilkie Collins, and narrates the story of a group of thieves who engineer a cruel plot to commit an heiress to a madhouse with real aplomb and skill. But the novel is even better than that: it brings out into the open social and cultural concerns Collins or Dickens could not have spoken about quite so directly (particularly pornography and same-sex eroticism), and shows great insight into the metafictional issues involved in reworking this subgenre of the sensation novel. I recommend this extremely highly.

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Summary: wordsmith.
Review: sarah waters is a genius. fans of her first two novels will be equally taken with this, her third offering. unlike gregory maguire's creative vision, which seems to have lost a little steam after the spellbinding _wicked_, waters' universe of theives, rogues, lesbians, ingenues, scallywags, mystics, orphans, loons and vaudvilleans remains as fresh and captivating as it was in _tipping the velvet_ and _affinity_. while descriptions of sexual situations and bodily functions are discussed more frankly than they would have been in a true victorian novel, her attention to details is mindboggling. and, while this is the author's longest work, to date, the reader is more likely to fret about running out of pages than having to read another. go get this book.

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Summary: The Worst Ausicious Novel I Have Read in Years
Review: This is the first and last book I will ever read based off of its inclusion in the Booker Prize short list. Why this was ever critically aclaimed is beyond me. The storyline is preposterous (although, I admit, I was slightly engaged in the first of the three parts, but that was before the emergence of ridiculous plot twists), and the writing lacks the wisdom, insight, and, at the very least, technique to pull this novel about Victorian porno fiction into a realm that could remotely be called literary. If you want a good laugh, read this book. It has offered me many moments of amusement, but overall, it is trite.

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Summary: Great Story
Review: Fingersmith tells a great big wonderful story, one which you can sink your teeth into and really enjoy. It started off in almost the same mode as Slammerkin. London city girl with checkered past travels to countryside to deceive people, but after that, the two stories diverge and this one is excellent. The story of Maud and Sue, two young women trapped in a web of deceipt and lies, a web woven by both themselves and others is thoroughly engrossing, filled with doublecrosses and interesting plot twists. This is a very well-done, well-told story that you can really lose yourself in. Enjoy.

Rating:
Summary: astounding
Review: i read this book more feverishly than any other in quite awhile. i thought it was going to break my heart. i very nearly exhausted myself being up with a hundred pages a night. i don't quite know how it happened that i fell for the people in the grey areas amongst themselves in the same way they fell about eachother. astounding.

Rating:
Summary: Pickpocketing the Pages of History
Review: Sarah Waters' third novel begins simply enough. Sue Trinder is a teenage orphan who lives amongst a group of confidence men, thieves, baby farmers and fingersmiths (a 19th-century term for a pickpockets). An unscrupulous man commonly and ironically known as Gentleman compels Sue to join in his plot to win the heart of an elderly bookish man's niece named Maud. Maud is heiress to a fortune, but she can only claim it if she marries. The plan is: win the lady, ditch the wife in an insane asylum and split the fortune. Sue becomes Maud's maid and when the plot is reaching its timely conclusion is the exact point where it is fractured and split like a forest path into numerous twisting paths revealing long held secrets and hidden strife. Sue and Maud are made to endure separate trials in their journey including the incarceration in a mad house, the subjection of reading and transcribing appalling pornography to a perverted old man and a dangerous journey through treacherous London in search of a friend in order for them to discover what their true pasts consist of and what predestined traits may tweak their futures.

It is fitting that at the beginning of this novel a reference is made to Dickens' Oliver Twist. Fingersmith is a novel descended from Dickens voluminous library as well as much 19th century sensualist fiction. Waters skilled use of language to evoke characters and a sense of place through physical detail and psychological mapping of experience is a distinct characteristic of this descent. She also has a tremendous ability to use fabulous names such as (Mrs Sucksby and Miss Bacon) as Dickens did to mark poignant traits of her characters. Where Waters veers from Dickens is in her conjuring of robust female characters who can dominate the novel, not through the circumstances of their plight and their representation of certain social injustice, but through the powerful voice they use to assert their individual positions. Of course the great descriptions and plotting Waters uses to conjure this tale of a 19th century English plot to capture a family fortune makes a great many statements about the ways in which women were marginalised and the bizarre social positions they were forced to inhabit. However, the great strength of her brilliant protagonists Sue and Maud is in the way their actions are guided more by their impulsive desire to survive rather than to spur the trim, thrilling plot or subscribe to any societal roles presented to them. Their struggles led by these natures produces a longing for a happy resolution built not out of sentimentally contrived conventions, but a deserved reward for revealing to us their faulty human natures.

Sue and Maud are not angels. They both deceive and betray each other, but they discover in this Darwinian world a rare affection for each other and a chance to share confidence when one's closest family is apt to betray you. The curious mirroring effect Waters uses with them, mixing pasts and characteristics of them, is descended from a more recent literary genius, Angela Carter. There are elements of her ideas (particularly realised in her novel Wise Children) on the way identity can be splintered, performed and reimagined which correspond to the ways Susan and Maud's fates are intertwined. Their relationship is drawn out as a struggle to express their mutual love and define their suppressed lesbian desires. But this is also presented as an arduous task to realise the aspects which make them powerful individuals. This novel makes the remote past enticingly familiar and relates a harrowing story that makes you wish it to continue on and on.

Rating:
Summary: Must say...this is an incredible read.
Review: Sarah Waters has two previous books, TIPPING THE VELVET and AFFINITY, but this is by far her best. What she does with the characters and the plot are brilliant. It's one of those books that you stay up late at night with a flashlight reading, and as you near the end you slow down because you don't want it to end.

It just got nominated for the Booker Prize, which is very exciting. Great writing, amazing story, and simply fabulous. This is the first author in a long time that I wholeheartedly support--buying numerous copies to give as gifts, as well as talking her up every chance I get. She deserves all of the raves and the success.

Rating:
Summary: 21st Century Dickens
Review: Right from an early reference to Oliver Twist it's clear that this is indeed Dickens updated for a new century. The squalor of Victorian England is vividly portrayed here, but Waters' page turner of a plot takes us further, to the dirty corners of society even Dickens didn't dare to investigate - lunatic asylums and pornographers' libraries. The setting convinces and the themes of greed, betrayal and love are ably handled. Pigeonholers could call this a 'lesbian novel' - again a theme unexplored by Dickens - but *Fingersmith* is much more than this, and anyone who likes reading should try it.