Fingersmith

I finished reading Fingersmith by Sarah Waters today. This marks a significant milestone for me for some very special reasons.

Though I cannot now remember where I actually bought this book, I distinctly remember why I bought it. It had a very beautiful cover, but it was the fact that the edges, the pages of the book, were colored, and this color matched the primary color from the cover image. This actually gave it the appearance of a single colored block. Though this kind of page edge coloring is more common these days, back when I bought this book more than five years ago, this felt very unique. Its one of the few books that I took with me from India to Prague when I moved here.

I just decided to read only all these years later. It is a chunky 500+ page novel set in Victorian England. I wasn't sure if the actual book would match up to its beautiful visual appearance.

I really, really enjoyed this period piece. It is written in a way that is wonderfully evocative of the time and place where the events of the novel took place.

The central characters are very well written, and the treatment of lesbian romance is done in a way that seems to focus on the act of love itself, rather than any associated strangeness with it. It also features one of the finer twists I have come across in fiction.

Overall, I would say this was a wonderful read that I perhaps waited far too long to get to, but perhaps the wait was what made the experience all the more sweeter.