Reading Buddies: The Woman In White- Third Epoch and Book Review

First Epoch, Second Epoch, Third Epoch (you’re here!)

Hello fellow Reading Buddies! I’m going to be discussing my thoughts on the final section of the book today. This part will probably have some spoilers so skip this if you haven’t read the book.

For my non-spoiler thoughts, skip down a bit to the bottom of the post for my review of the book.

After the cliffhanger of an ending on the second epoch, I couldn’t wait to get started on the final section. The final section didn’t disappoint. Everything the first two epochs have been building towards climaxes with the final epoch. There is SO much going on in this section. Even though it’s a long section, I feel like it’s just revelation after revelation. It’s just a lot of craziness going on but I enjoyed it.

Many of the revelations shocked me. I’m fairly decent at ‘predicting’ what’s going to happen in mystery books. Basically I was just completely wrong about everything, haha. I originally thought that Sir Percival was in love with Anne and that’s why he locked her up. I was wrong about that. Then I suspected that maybe he was her father. Bam, wrong about that too. I really enjoyed being surprised about the turn of events. It’s been quite a while for a book to completely take me by surprise.

Reading buddies:

• eBook Read!
• Erin Reads (Part One | Part Two)
• Rebecca Reads
• Ardent Reader (Part One | Part Two)

The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins

Genre: Adult Fiction, Classic, Mystery

Source: Amazon Public Domain freebie

Summary from Goodreads:

The Woman in White is a Victorian melodrama concerning a mysterious woman in white who bears an uncanny resemblance to the fiancee of Lord Glyde, a sophisticated fortune hunter. First published as a serial between 1859 and 1860, this chronicle of evil, suspense, and villainy is believed to be the first English novel to deal with crime detection.

Review

I went into this book completely blind. I searched quite a while for a decent summary of the book but never could find a good one.  All I could find were reviews of people who really enjoyed it.

I have to say all those people were on target! This was surprisingly enjoyable. I have a strained relationship with classics so I wasn’t sure if I’d get along with this book. I think a lot of my enjoyment came from taking it easy with the book. I didn’t go into this trying to read the whole thing in a few days. I spaced it out and read a few sections a day for almost a month. It really helped because I wasn’t too overwhelmed and the book was written as a serial.

First the ‘bad’. This book was long and pretty dense (at least for me). I felt the author was pretty wordy in some places and just wished he would move on. There were some parts that I did skim because of how long he was taking.

Now the good. I loved the use of many, many narrators. I’ve read books that have used multiple narrators before but this was very different. It was interesting to ‘hear’ the story from different people. I didn’t have a hard time keeping everyone straight. Everyone had a pretty distinct voice.

The plot/story was really good. Because the book is so long, the story takes many different twists and turns. I never knew what to expect. I can predict what will happen in mysteries a good portion of the time but this book threw me off. I was wrong about everything that I suspected! While the book is a mystery, it isn’t a ‘keep you on the edge of your seat’ mystery. It is more slow paced than mystery books today.

Rating 4/5

If you love mysteries and/or classics, definitely pick this book up! Just be aware that it’s not a quick read though.