Reviews
The premise of the book looked exciting because it had three super interesting elements - Bronté sisters, the last living descendant of the Bronté family and a treasure hunt. It starts with Samantha Whipple, the last living descendant of the Bronté family joining Oxford Old College to study English Literature. Even though speculation is rife all over that she inherited the "Vast Bronté Estate" even though all she got was her father's bookmark and words that one day she would inherit the "Warnings of Experience". And then she starts receiving her father's copies of the Bronté books one by one. She also slowly starts falling in love with her tutor Orville. And that's all I understood in the book. The whole treasure hunt plot is almost nonexistent. There is some discussion about different interpretations of the sisters' books, their semi-autobiographical nature and how much of their books impacted their lives. This is probably the only saving grace of the book. There was a lot of banter between Samantha and Orville but it will probably make more sense to students of English Literature. Which brings me to the worst part of the book - it's narrator Samantha. She hates her family legacy, the sisters, the course she has enrolled to study and pretty much everything else. She comes across as naive, confused, disrespectful and obsessive. It was very difficult to find anything likable about her. Sometimes you want to complete books even though you don't like the characters because there is something inherently interesting; here, I couldn't wait for it to get over fast enough.
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Highlights
You want a reason to believe that there is something out there larger than yourself, something that makes all the petty things you’ve been through seem irrelevant.
Reading teaches you courage. The author is trying to convince you something fake is real. It’s a ridiculous request, and it questions the sanity of the reader. The extent to which you believe the author depends on how willing you are to jump in headfirst.
You are desperately alone and I’m afraid that this is what desperately alone people do—you attach significance to imaginary things to ease your sense of emptiness.
To reconstruct a dead person’s intention is to create a piece of fiction yourself
You’re determined to honor your pain because you think it defines you.
He lived in the past because nothing was at stake there.
The real problem was this: my father was in the grave, and I could do nothing to write him out of it.
I scooted closer to my soggy, chattering classmates, aware of the acute loneliness you feel when surrounded by so many other people.
Ergo, authors uniformly assume madness is deep. They’re wrong. Sometimes, insane people aren’t tortured artists. Sometimes, insane people are just insane.
Love always came with scars, and this was mine: the knowledge that the friends I knew best were those I had never actually met.
Passion. There it was, my least favorite word. It was the elusive—yes, meaningless—term people used when they wanted to believe they were more human than other humans.
...books don’t have answers because life has no meaning.
If you can’t think of anything intelligent to say, don’t say anything at all.
“The purpose of literature is to teach you how to think, not how to be practical. Learning to discover the connective tissue between seemingly unrelated events is the only way we are equipped to understand patterns in the real world.”