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Title: Gwendolen

Author: Diana Souhami

Narrator: Laura Kirman

Format: Unabridged

Length: 8 hrs and 48 mins

Language: English

Release date: 09-25-14

Publisher: Quercus

Genres: Fiction, Contemporary

Publisher's Summary:

I was winning until I met your gaze... Gambling at the roulette tables of the Kursaal, Gwendolen Harleth glances up to meet Daniel Deronda's arresting stare. Striking, selfish and wilful, she is at that moment the mistress of her destiny.

Thirty years on, the flawed heroine and true protagonist of Eliot's last great novel writes her confessional to the man whose ever-imagined gaze has prevailed throughout her life. The egotism, naiveté and sensitivity of her blazing youth is evoked with bittersweet wisdom; a passionate remembrance of the events leading up to the marriage that broke her spirit, and the loss of the man who broke her heart.

Moving, original and elegant, this is a bravura re-imagining of the life of one of English literature's most multi-faceted and contradictory heroines.

Critic Reviews:

"Completely beguiling" (Rebecca Mead, author of The Road to Middlemarch)

Members Reviews:

A depressive, plain read about a plain character

Gwendolen is a strange book. If I could compare it to something, I would say it is like a musical performance...picture one instrument that starts a song by playing one note. You think "this is strange" but wait for something to change. Then other instruments come in, but they keep playing the same note, holding the same note. Despite the variance in sound type, the tone is the same.

That is this book....the tone is the same.

When I began reading Gwendolen, I found it very interesting. The book started with a certain tone, and it worked. Depressive, uncertain, yet egocentric feelings permeated most pages, and they made sense because we know quite quickly that we are likely looking back after a relatively easily guessed sorrowful situation has taken place. This tone persists through recollections of that event and period...also understandable. However, what is not understandable is that the same tone continues even after the character of Gwendolen finds a road to recovery...no matter how tentative that recovery may be....it is peppered with interesting characters and times and places that could have afforded a change in the composition and overall greyscale of the book. Even an exciting milestone and turning point Gwendolen experiences manages to feel dry....and the last pages have the same feeling as the first.

Gwendolen self-absorbed is the theme of this book, and she manages to stay basically unlikeable throughout the text. I say unlikeable because there is nothing defined about her besides the event and year of her life she lets define her and her stunning physical beauty. However, Gwendolen sees herself as the center of many universes and can never wrap her mind around the fact that other people do not also see this as so.

I give this book three stars, because the author is a skilled writer. I'm sure this was a rough undertaking...crafting a book using an existing character in literature and trying to make them more while staying true to a basic essence.