Ooohhhhh my goodness. All the times I thought this book wasn’t something I was going to like..all the times I thought books set in this particular historical setting weren’t for me…and all the times I thought plot wasn’t the thing that made a book great for me…I was wrong, sooo wrong.
The book is 1,243 pages long …but it wasn’t long enough. I wanted this go on forever.

I guess there is a reason it is a classic and is still read 180 years after it first appeared… not so many books achieve that do they.

The summary of the book is written above in the description, so I won’t repeat that but I will say that the story is exciting, fast paced, fun, sad, funny, ridiculous, bonkers, a glorious rollercoaster. But it isn’t just a fantastic plot…it also conjures up a feeling of walking inside the book and being in the places described. For example, there is a description early on of a carnival in Rome. The experience of being at the carnival was made so real i honestly felt I could have put the book down, looked around me and seen everything that had been described right there in front of me. It was beautiful, noisy, bustling and alive. This was something I felt all through the book. I think this is because the story is told with little thought to brevity. That is not to say it should have been shorter or was at any time boring…every sentence was wonderful. The story doesn’t sit around getting stagnant but it does tell the story in such a way that you feel you are right there within the pages.

At times the plot is a bit craaazzzy but I loved it. Sometimes stories don’t have to be completely plausible to be enjoyable.

I loved that a book written in the 1800s had a strong gay female character, descriptions of a drug trip, erotic dreams, extramarital affairs…things you honestly wouldn’t expect from a book written in that era.

All in all I am bereft that this story is over and I have learnt to not assume I won’t like a book until I have tried it.


Excellent on a reread in 2023