Affinity by Sarah Waters
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Book Reviews of Affinity
Book Review: Easily One of the Five Best Books I've Ever Read!
Summary: 5 Stars
What can you say about a novel that when you are through reading it you actually miss the characters in it because they have almost become part of your life?
Margaret and I had become old friends. We had walked those narrow prison hallways together. We had wondered about Selena and her gifts and whether she was what she said she was. And we had decided to trust her. Actually, the point had come that we had no choice but to trust her because we were no longer capable of clear thinking where she was concerned. And we mourned together when we discovered how badly we had been used. I couldn't have asked for more in a book.
The characters were likable, recognizable, and fully human. The plot was old as time itself, if a bit out of mainstream for our puritanical day and time. Some may consider this a "lesbian novel" but I consider it a human novel. Just as Brokeback Mountain is much more a human story than it is a gay story. Its theme? Honesty, pure and simple!
Sarah Waters' work should be topping the best seller lists instead of most of the tripe that sits there now.
Book Review: Another great book from Waters
Summary: 5 Stars
I was expecting this novel to be like her first, Tipping the Velvet, but it was nothing like it. However, it was just as good, if not better. Affinity is a gothic tale of a 'spinster,' Margaret, that visits female prisoners.
Margaret went through a depression after her father passed away a couple years ago. She decides to spend time with the female prisoners on weekly basis in order to get herself out of the house and improve her mood. She finds a mysterious prisoner, Selina, there and begins visiting her every week. Selina is a spirit-medium and slowly begins opening up to Margaret. I'd say more, but I don't want to spoil it.
Waters has created a story that weaves the reader in, out and around and leaves them at the edge of their seats until the last couple pages. I highly recommend this book to anyone that enjoys edge-of-your-seat gothic suspense. To everyone else, I still recommend it.
Book Review: Wow, what a book!
Summary: 5 Stars
A thriller set in Victorian England, I stayed up late into the night finishing this one. There were many twists & turns and the ending was a total surprise, the ending actually left me feeling outraged. I will read this again sometime soon to see what little details along the way I missed the first time. The story is of a high-strung spinster who becomes a regular "visitor" to a women's prison where the conditions are wretched. She meets a woman inmate who was a practicing spiritualist before being imprisoned and is still apparently in touch with the world of spirits.
I have also read Sarah Waters' "Tipping the Velvet" and enjoyed that as well, another Victorian setting, but more "bawdy", a lesbian coming out story. "Affinity" is for anyone who enjoys occult thrillers, historical novels or the spiritualist period in Victorian England.
Book Review: A pageturner that wins your confidence
Summary: 5 Stars
"Confidence" is the operative watchword of Sarah Waters's splendid second novel set in the Victorian period: it is told through the confidences told in the diaries of two women, one a wealthy single woman who is visiting prisoners in a London pentitentiary, and the other a medium who has been arrested for fraud. As the novel continues, Margaret Prior slowly comes to gain confidence in the medium, Selina Dawes, especially when she herself is visited by ghostly manifestations. It is almost impossible to put the novel down: it gains your own confiedence as you go along, and you come to care desperately about the characters. But this (like Waters's next novel FINGERSMITH) is the rare pageturner that also builds a complex web of allusion and metaphor as it proceeds.Book Review: Fascinating
Summary: 5 Stars
This novel is gripping, realistic, and fascinating. I loved the protagonist and found myself desperately rooting for her. Her past is gradually revealed, the readers' sympathies for her grow accordingly. We readers fall under the same spell that she does. Loved the author's metaphors about prisons and how women in that era were all imprisoned, one way or another. The denouement is chilling, painful, and brilliant. I could not put down the last 100 pages. Waters is a master....after reading the ending's twists and turns, I frantically flipped back the pages and realized that Waters had laid all the clues down perfectly. As others have noted, this is not a novel that leaves you feeling happy and light. It is a stunning work which you can only marvel at.