I maintain a semi-regular blog at Wordpress. I'd like to install Wordpress on this site and host everything from here, but despite my trusty "Wordpress for Dummies", I haven't had time to read into it yet. I'm going to mirror the last post on my blog here as well, but until I get my act together, it'd probably be a better idea just to head over there...

Review: I Capture The Castle, Dodie Smith
Posted May 19th, 2010

I started writing this review about seven weeks ago. It seems silly that it's sat in my drafts pile for so long, so here it is.

Title: I Capture The Castle Author: Dodie Smith Year Published: 1949 Genre: Young adult, romance Serialization: Stand-alone Rating: 10/10 Premise: Cassandra Mortmain is a young and aspiring writer seeking to improve her prose by capturing the life of her quirky family in the pages of her journal: they live in a desolate and dilapidated castle, her older sister Rose is desperate to be married off so she can escape poverty, her family's loyal but unpaid helper and adopted son is growing alarmingly attached to her, her father has been struggling with crippling creative stagnation in the ten years since his brilliant debut publication, and her stepmother is running out of ideas of what other furniture they can sell to buy food.

And then the Cottons, an American family who own the castle the Mortmains are leasing, move in next door. The younger brother is charming and carefree, and the older brother is sophisticated...and enamoured with Rose. Amid schemes of marriage for her sister and painfully extracted inspiration for her father, Cassandra struggles to cope with the more bittersweet aspects of relationships and comes into her own brilliant voice as a writer.

(Minor spoilers, but I've managed to largely preserve the plot.)

Review: Ah, where to start with this one. This book came very highly recommended by someone whose opinion I trust almost implicitly, which can be a bit of a double-edged sword. On one hand, I was fully prepared to enjoy it. On the other, I also fully expected to enjoy it.

Another bit of relevant context is that I read this book immediately after I read Feed, by M. T. Anderson, a fantastic dystopian YA novel that would have turned me into a sobbing wreck had I read it at the intended age. I Capture The Castle is lovably cheerful as it is, but following on the tails of Feed this book was positively idyllic.

Digressions aside, this book lived up to every expectation I had for it, and then some. In a recent "let's get to know everyone in the office!" staff survey at work, I listed it as my favourite book, and not just because it was a less embarrassing choice than Harry Potter. And it's oddly hard to review a book you loved unconditionally.

Here are some reasons you should read this book:

1. The cast of characters is certainly quirky by any standard, but it is not so quirky that it feels like the author is trying too hard to be interesting. For example, I wouldn't have expected a model-turned-doting-stepmother character to be believable, let alone noble, but she is. Furthermore, not only are the members of the two families entirely charismatic, but even minor supporting roles like the friendly librarian down the street and the neighbourhood vicar are fleshed out individuals.

2. The relationships are subtle and carefully crafted. There were several points in the book where Smith could have easily fallen into a cliché--the son of the late family cook falling in love with Cassandra and declaring his intentions, for example--but the author instead chose to sidestep the obvious path of conflict resolution and create a more complicated but nuanced web of relationships.

3. Cassandra Mortmain. Period. She is one of the most enchanting female protagonists I've read in a long time, and somehow manages to be strong and independent and yet vulnerable without coming across like a complete Mary Sue. Apart from serving as a narrative device, her journal is also full of witty observations about life that don't always figure into the plot, which I find delightfully realistic.

(I also thought that the book was really well-paced, but talking at length about the timing of the events would give the plot away, so I won't.)

With some books and movies, even the ones that start out promisingly, once I find out about the main conflict and plot twist I no longer want to read or watch on. I feel like I can predict what's going to happen and how things are going to play out, and I can see in my mind the awkward scenes of characters trying to reconcile and make peace. The entire thing just fills me with dread. I don't want to deal with uncomfortable and often badly written scenes...I get enough of those in real life! (According to a vague WebMD-based self-diagnosis, this might have something to do with anxiety.)

I Capture The Castle had a twist, and a conflict, and a tantrum, but I didn't mind it at all. I think that's one of the resulting strengths of casting Cassandra as the narrator. One of the things that makes writing first-person narratives so difficult is that it's easy for the emotions of the narrator to become forced and unnatural, and the reader stops empathizing with the character. Cassandra, however, is so down-to-earth and genuine that when things go wrong for her, that stomach-wrenching sense of dread I feel becomes something that ties me to her, not something that turned me off the book. She doesn't know how things are going to turn out, any more than the reader does, and her despair that she may have messed everything up becomes incredibly endearing.

(And, by the way, the final resolution didn't play out exactly to my expectations either, so that was a very pleasant surprise.)

This segues into the thing I loved best about the book: how respectful it was of both its characters and the reader. Though Cassandra is as ingenuous as a teenager in love for the first time can be expected to be, Smith writes as though she were oblivious to the character's shortsightedness. There was never an undertone of amusement at the naïveté of a younger character, or the shadow of a more bitter and jaded voice hinting at life's decided lack of rose-coloured glasses. It seems like so often the reader and the author are sharing a private joke at the character's expense, and you don't realize until the joke is absent how refreshing it is to just candidly observe a character you've come to love grow up, and into her own.

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