From Powells:
A haunting, heart-rending first novel by an award-winning writer that speaks to the difficulties of forging an identity in a world of different cultures–and to the complexities of familial and sexual love.
This sums up the novel rather well. It was an intriguing narrative that I had to keep reminding myself was fiction. […]

The writing in this book unsettled me in the beginning.  There are no quotation marks.  Everything runs together.  But it ended up suiting the story really, really well.  The style was simple and powerful, and the characters were written in the same way.  Also, it didn’t feel like a single word was wasted.  Which can’t […]

I absolutely loved this. There is quite a lot of controversy linked with this story, and what was really happening. Was their really evil? Was the Governess mad?
The end is rather inconclusive and leaves the reader to decide for themselves.
I thought it was very compelling and well written. James did a […]

“It’s a secondhand world we’re born into. What is novel to us is only so because we’re newborn, and what we cannot see, that has come before- what our parents have seen and been and done- are the hand-me-downs we begin to wear as swaddling clothes, even as we ourselves are naked. The […]

“But, she thought, her story wasn’t over yet.  Possibilities remained.  Sometimes Agnes felt frozen in the expectation of a remarkable destiny that might still materialize” (p 36).
“She had this reaction at church when a familiar hymn was sung, at the symphony when the violins were exquisite, even at baseball games when the tenor began the […]