It should be no surprise that I loved this, because there are few things I love more than a big fat Victorian novel and this is, in fact, a big fat Victorian novel (think Trollope, not Dickens) that just happens to have been written in the twenty-first century. It does share some of the flaws of the big fat Victorian novel -- e.g., a certain bagginess and a collection of underbaked female characters -- but I am forgiving because this kind of social novel seems so rare these days.