It's a pretty simple story, but I loved this book to bits, primarily because I enjoyed the characters so much. I think that Trollope writes his "good" characters much better than Dickens does -- Doctor Thorne and even Mary come across as more real than, say, Madeline Bray or Agnes Wickfield. It's long and you have to have a tolerance for the glacial pace at which Victorian novels often proceed but I found it as relaxing as a long, hot bath.