About a young woman in 19 50'/60's America as she has a breakdown. POwerful, emotional stuff.

RELEASE NOTES:

swapped with Peanut Lion for her copy of 'Of Mice and Men'

Just got home to find this waiting for me as part of a trade - yay!

Of Mice and Men will be on its way to you tomorrow now that I'm back :)

Normally I would be racing for the 'ratings' bar to give this book a number of stars but on this occasion I'm struggling. See, I loved the first half of this book. Plath writes the character of Esther with such brilliance. Esther's incredibly realistic thought processes and frustration with a life that she is going to be forced into regardless of her intellectual skill or independent will shows some truly genius writing. But it all seemed to go downhill once she started going 'mad'.

First of all there's no real analysis of the shock therapy - her feelings toward it are totally absent and I find it hard to believe that a girl with such passions would become completely apathetic toward her treatment. Maybe I'm wrong and that's exactly the point that Plath is trying to make, but I just can't believe it. Secondly, at this point the characters became a bit samey and the story became nothing. And finally, there were too many missing elements. We never really got to the bottom of how Esther felt about anything or indeed what had made her go off the rails in the first place. Did she even go off the rails or was it just society portraying her that way?

I do wonder whether this is another case of me having overly high expectations on a book and also not being able to sympathise with the time when it was written. I appreciate that in 1963 this was probably a landmark book, dealing with mental illness in a much more truthful fashion. But, personally, by the end I was just left feeling cold.

RELEASE NOTES:

Actually on a wall at the top of frederick road near the subway. Just by the bus-stop and next to Calthorpe Mansions!