Though I liked some parts better than others, I found myself really enjoying this book. Oddly enough, I think my favorite parts were the play itself, where you could tell that Woolf was attempting to impart a really important message, but she deliberately made the message unclear through the play's fragmentation and incomplete description.

Pop Sugar Reading Challenge 2019-A book that takes place in a single day

I just didn't see what the point was. I actually really liked a couple of the snippets from the pageant. But, everything about the audience seemed so superficial. I wish she had concentrated more upon Isa and Giles.

I did like the descirptions of Mrs. Swithin, though.

I'm so pleased that Ms. Woolf was able to shake off the malaise of The Years and write one more masterpiece before her demons caught up with her.

Amazingly, after so many fine novels--and then the one real dud--she finds some new ground to tread here and it's very beautiful. Although she's always been a mistress of the finely wrought sentence, here she fell into sheer poetry at times, using alliteration, assonance, syllabic rhythms, and even rhyme, making Between the Acts the most musical of all of her prose compositions.

The themes, too, of English history, family, class, and social matters--Englishness basically--works so well in this setting: just six weeks before the beginning of the Second World War. But it's the musicality that drew me in and held me, the Joycean flow of the prose. Utterly lovely. Woolf's best formal experiment, in my humble opinion.

3.5

I just love her

The prose was interesting and the concept was cool, with everything happening between the acts of a play, but it was kind of boring because the whole book takes place over the course of one day. The characters are nice, but nothing really compelled me to keep reading. I'm not sure why I finished it, honestly.

Though I start this book for writing an essay of Woolf's work, I ended up quite like it. And Woolf too. Her way of writing is subtle and she never limits her writing. She writes the story and she writes about writing too. She attempts to write about language and go beyond language.


My favourite part is towards the end when the play on the pageant comes to the Present part. When a giant reflecting mirror revealed on stage and puts the audience on the stage. It is astonishingly artistic and realistic and just amazing. I really liked this plot. And also her way when writing the actors, she also makes them part of the village by recognizing who they are, for example, a wife of XXX family or a daughter. And the play is about history. It is full of symbolism but not the ones that dramatize the whole thing. It's like a giant metaphor that puts everyone in and makes the reader reflect about their own identities and life.

there is much poetry, there is much play
it is as funny as it is moving, as expansive as it is precise