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jazzy_daveSamantha Harvey "The Western Wind" (Vintage)
I found this paperback in my local Fleuers bookshop for a quid and it looked intriguing. However, it is a bit of a mixed bag. Samantha Harvey's The Western Wind is set in an out-of-the-way village in 1490s England, and the first half of the book in particular is a careful portrait of a small medieval community, written with a keen eye for landscape and the mundane details of everyday life. In that early part of the novel, too, Harvey impressed me with her attempt to enter into a medieval mindset—there are some anachronisms, yes, but I'll take a more convincing mentality with some mistakes about days and clothes any day over a book where 21st-century characters are playing dress-up in perfect period attire.
However, the novel flags in the latter part, even its early lyricism fading; it read almost as if Harvey ran out of things to say earlier than her self-imposed chronological structure allowed. Still an interesting read, and I would pick up another book by Harvey if I came across it, but I finished The Western Wind feeling as if there were possible depths to it that she had never quite plumbed.
I found this paperback in my local Fleuers bookshop for a quid and it looked intriguing. However, it is a bit of a mixed bag. Samantha Harvey's The Western Wind is set in an out-of-the-way village in 1490s England, and the first half of the book in particular is a careful portrait of a small medieval community, written with a keen eye for landscape and the mundane details of everyday life. In that early part of the novel, too, Harvey impressed me with her attempt to enter into a medieval mindset—there are some anachronisms, yes, but I'll take a more convincing mentality with some mistakes about days and clothes any day over a book where 21st-century characters are playing dress-up in perfect period attire.
However, the novel flags in the latter part, even its early lyricism fading; it read almost as if Harvey ran out of things to say earlier than her self-imposed chronological structure allowed. Still an interesting read, and I would pick up another book by Harvey if I came across it, but I finished The Western Wind feeling as if there were possible depths to it that she had never quite plumbed.
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