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A review by brisingr
The Scapegoat by Daphne du Maurier
3.0
I was very curious to read a book by this writer, especially after all the good things I've heard.
This book uses the famous theme in the Prince and the Pauper and puts our protagonist face to face with a man that looks exactly like him. Curious being, he ends up spending the day and a big part of the night with his copy, sharing life stories. When he wakes up in the morning, a personal driver is waiting for him and adresses him by the title Count, and the man he met the day before gone with all his belongings.
I'm saying this quite often, but I am really unsure on how I feel about this book. It takes a while to get you interested into the story, but once it does, it's quite impossible to truly leave the story. The writing style is full of description and it presents quite a lot of uninteresting facts, but it's still captivating. I liked this, because it made you feel like you can always go back to the story.
The characters were the best part. All of them pretty weird, but equally interesting, they brought in fun dialogues, lots of frutrations and interesting situations. We have a whole family who depends financially on the one girl they cannot really stand and they try to keep their lifestyle, while keeping their glass factory still working. In their house, the saints are mixing with the lies and the betrayals and the past with an unapreciated and too hard work. I loved how, even though you are in the middle of the family, you see the characters through the detached view of a stranger who takes part to the action, but it's not part of it.
I adored how real this book felt. This book doesn't show the happy life of the rich ones, and neither the hard life of those used to suffer. It just gives us an objective view, and it varies from hilarious to straight out tragic. The book is life in all of its forms, and the end has the same bitter taste of day-to-day unjustice.
I enjoyed reading this book, but at the same time, I was always counting the pages left until I'd finish it.
This book uses the famous theme in the Prince and the Pauper and puts our protagonist face to face with a man that looks exactly like him. Curious being, he ends up spending the day and a big part of the night with his copy, sharing life stories. When he wakes up in the morning, a personal driver is waiting for him and adresses him by the title Count, and the man he met the day before gone with all his belongings.
I'm saying this quite often, but I am really unsure on how I feel about this book. It takes a while to get you interested into the story, but once it does, it's quite impossible to truly leave the story. The writing style is full of description and it presents quite a lot of uninteresting facts, but it's still captivating. I liked this, because it made you feel like you can always go back to the story.
The characters were the best part. All of them pretty weird, but equally interesting, they brought in fun dialogues, lots of frutrations and interesting situations. We have a whole family who depends financially on the one girl they cannot really stand and they try to keep their lifestyle, while keeping their glass factory still working. In their house, the saints are mixing with the lies and the betrayals and the past with an unapreciated and too hard work. I loved how, even though you are in the middle of the family, you see the characters through the detached view of a stranger who takes part to the action, but it's not part of it.
I adored how real this book felt. This book doesn't show the happy life of the rich ones, and neither the hard life of those used to suffer. It just gives us an objective view, and it varies from hilarious to straight out tragic. The book is life in all of its forms, and the end has the same bitter taste of day-to-day unjustice.
I enjoyed reading this book, but at the same time, I was always counting the pages left until I'd finish it.