Very interesting - and another two on the list of books I must get round to reading some day!
I think you are perhaps being a little hard on the Amazon reviewers - we don't all have to like the same books or the same people. And they might well have been very young: despite what everyone always says about young people being very open-minded, I was certainly very priggish as a teenager, and I know many others who were too - it is quite hard to get past the conditioning that a drug user, say, or someone who is racist, or very violent or promiscuous, is a 'bad' person. Of course, it is the good author's business to get you to sympathize with someone you might not normally like - but perhaps in this case the reader was simply too young.
As an adult, sadly, it is now the authors who tend to seem priggish to me - often on very 'politically correct' grounds. My heart sinks at the inevitable feisty heroine with whom I am supposed to identify, or at the novel (or film - like 'Titanic') where all the rich people are villains while the poor have hearts of gold. I think that the novels that work best are the ones where the authors believe in their characters - as many of them as possible - take them seriously and let their story follow its natural course, even if they do not like one another.
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I think you are perhaps being a little hard on the Amazon reviewers - we don't all have to like the same books or the same people. And they might well have been very young: despite what everyone always says about young people being very open-minded, I was certainly very priggish as a teenager, and I know many others who were too - it is quite hard to get past the conditioning that a drug user, say, or someone who is racist, or very violent or promiscuous, is a 'bad' person. Of course, it is the good author's business to get you to sympathize with someone you might not normally like - but perhaps in this case the reader was simply too young.
As an adult, sadly, it is now the authors who tend to seem priggish to me - often on very 'politically correct' grounds. My heart sinks at the inevitable feisty heroine with whom I am supposed to identify, or at the novel (or film - like 'Titanic') where all the rich people are villains while the poor have hearts of gold. I think that the novels that work best are the ones where the authors believe in their characters - as many of them as possible - take them seriously and let their story follow its natural course, even if they do not like one another.