Book 8: "Little, Big" by John Crowley
Monday, March 10th, 2008 13:58![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kittiwakeIt was the year's longest day, Sophie knew, but why should it be called Midsummer when summer has just begun? Maybe only because it was the day, the first day, on which summer seemed endless; seemed to stretch out before and behind limitlessly, and every other season was out of mind and unimaginable. Even the stretch of the screen-door's spring and the clack of its closing behind her as she went in, and the summer odor of the vestibule, seemed no longer new, and were as though they has always been.
The book starts with Smokey Barnable walking from New York to his fiancee's family home upstate for his wedding to Daily Alice Drinkwater. But the Tale starts much earlier, with the building of Edgewood by Alice's great-grandfather John Drinkwater, or back in England even earlier than that, when Oliver Hawksquill finds a pack of fortune-telling cards in a ruined house and gives them to a girl who says that she can see fairies.
Ever since then 'they' have watched over the many members of the growing family, but what do Mrs Underhill and her like really want, and what will happen when the Tale ends?
A long book and an engrossing read, and even if there are long periods where nothing much seems to happen, the effect is calming and somehow soporific, but never boring.
The book starts with Smokey Barnable walking from New York to his fiancee's family home upstate for his wedding to Daily Alice Drinkwater. But the Tale starts much earlier, with the building of Edgewood by Alice's great-grandfather John Drinkwater, or back in England even earlier than that, when Oliver Hawksquill finds a pack of fortune-telling cards in a ruined house and gives them to a girl who says that she can see fairies.
Ever since then 'they' have watched over the many members of the growing family, but what do Mrs Underhill and her like really want, and what will happen when the Tale ends?
A long book and an engrossing read, and even if there are long periods where nothing much seems to happen, the effect is calming and somehow soporific, but never boring.
