Friday, August 29, 2008

Review: The Night Watch by Sarah Waters

This book has been on my list for a really long time. I even checked it out once and then couldn't get to it. Finally, I downloaded it onto my new Amazon Kindle and read it. It's a really long book, set in London around the time frame of World War 2, and the blitz on London. One thing that was praised about the book was the style of working backwards. It was definitely interesting, but it wasn't my favorite writing style. Basically, you get to read from the end of the story backwards.

Secondly, I knew that there was a lesbian character in the book. But that's not how I would characterize the book. I would say the book is more about being lesbian than it is about World War 2. I'm not making moral judgments at all, but I'm not a big fan of sex scenes even in heterosexual fiction. This book was a bit more than I really wanted to know about the subject. I don't know; maybe that makes me ignorant or whatever. But I think rather than being mainstream fiction, this really falls under a much narrower category of gay and lesbian fiction. Just my opinion - I've read a lot of positive reviews on the book, so I may be the one who is in the minority.

3 comments:

katrina said...

I loved this book, you should probably avoid any other of Sarah Waters books as the sex scenes in this were tame to the ones in some of her other books

Kathleen Gilligan said...

I'm not a fan of sex scenes either- no matter the pairing.

Bookfool said...

I really dislike sex scenes; my preference is for an author to just tippy-toe right around them. Implication is peachy. I've avoided Sarah Waters, for that reason -- both because I heard her sex was graphic and because it's lesbian. I'm not even interested in skimming. I'd probably learn too much I didn't want to know! LOL