The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox (Paperback)

from duende

Oooo, how frustrating! Yet, how engaging!This tragic story has three narrators and spans almost 80 years. The three voices braid together to tell a story of jealousy, betrayal, and maybe madness. I say "maybe" as I'm left unclear on whether there was madness to begin with, or whether madness was ...

from copperbeech

It's easy to disappear when no one cares where you are, particularly when you're a woman warehoused in the 1930s mental health system. O'Farrell's telling of this story is beautiful. From the book's opening, her skill morphing language into sensual experience grips and holds her reader until the ...

from SquirrelHead

This is a tragic story, full of twists and revelations, made all the more sad as the story's inspiration comes from historical records. In the 1930s era women could be locked in an insane asylum just for wandering off on long walks, or for keeping their hair long. Your liberty was at the whim of ...

from lit_chick

"We are all, Esme decides, just vessels through which identities pass: we are lent features, gestures, habits, then we hand them on. Nothing is our own. We begin in the world as anagrams of our antecedents." (134) Set primarily in Scotland, The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox begins in the early twe...

from SqueakyChu

I very much enjoyed reading this book - until its ending. How can a book be so good and then leave its readers so puzzled with the situation of its characters so unresolved? I guess we, the readers, could script our own ending. This is the story of Iris Lockhart, a young Scottish woman who makes ...