For Love Alone

by Christina Stead

High-minded, independent, imaginative, Teresa Hawkins knows only one commandment: ‘Thou shalt love’. Emotionally starved by her ramshackle family, Teresa searches for fulfilment outside her stultifying life as a working girl in a large city. Obsessed with love and sex she pins her affection on the first possible object, the egotistical Jonathan Crow, a poverty-stricken tutor who coaches her in Latin. Teresa preserves this love in the face of his indifference, contempt and ill-usage, imprisoned by her belief that ‘to love is to give for ever without stint, and not to ask for the slightest thing’. It is only through another man - her ebullient and warm-hearted employer James Quick - that Teresa comes to understand her power as a woman, and emerges from obsession to a real consciousness of sexuality and love.

Set in Sydney and London, For Love Alone, first published in 1945, is one of Christina Stead’s finest novels.

[Source: http://www.faber.co.uk/work/for-love-...]

Genres: Fiction, Australia, Classics, Romance, Literature, 20th Century, British Literature

512 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1944

About the author

Christina Stead (1902–1983) was an Australian writer regarded as one of the twentieth century’s master novelists. Stead spent most of her writing life in Europe and the United States, and her varied residences acted as the settings for a number of her novels. She is best known for The Man Who Loved Children (1940), which was praised by author Jonathan Franzen as a “crazy, gorgeous family novel” and “one of the great literary achievements of the twentieth century.” Stead died in her native Australia in 1983.

Reviews

[Jonathan · Rating 5 out of 5]

A young, intelligent, naive girl trapped by societal convention and family pressures. Grasping for education. Men. The first bad, the second good. A happy ending for the lovers. Marriage perhaps, or kids.

This would be the usual form. Trite, uninteresting, unrealistic.

Indeed, look at the poster for the (by all accounts awful) movie that got made of it:




This, like the front cover of the VMC edition (why could we not have had one of those wonderful paintings!), not only misrepresents the novel completely, but gives you no indication that this is a complex, passionately argued work which deals with issues of sexuality, gender and power which remain of great importance.

What Stead does, and what is so extraordinary (particularly when one notes it is 70-odd years old), is to blur the clichés, smear and smudge them, distort and unpick them, until they show something new, something interesting, something true.

Teresa is such a rich creation because she remains idiotic and intelligent, cowardly and brave, a realist and a romantic idealist. She is conflicted and confused. Stead evokes the frightening power of sexual awakening for such a girl in sections like that quoted below. It is, I think, quite brilliantly done. She is mad too or, at least, deranged by the impossible situation society placed her in - she must marry, but for love alone - not for convenience as many women in her position did, not out of fear - And yet what sort of man could she love? And does she know the difference between love and obsession, between a genuine recognition of the Other and the self-absorbed, endlessly circling romantic obsession which can do nothing but chew on its own tail...? One could, at times, get frustrated with her, irritated with her, were it not so clear that Stead feels the same, yet with an added sense of pity and sorrow that so many young intelligent women get into such situations. Teresa's concept of "love" is ridiculous, as is that of all those countless writers and daydreamers who claim to be "dying of love".

I always remember those wonderful lines of Rosalind's when I read that sort of thing:

"The poor world is almost six thousand years old, and in all this time there was not any man died in his own person, videlicet, in a love cause. Troilus had his brains dashed out with a Grecian club, yet he did what he could to die before, and he is one of the patterns of love. Leander, he would have lived many a fair year though Hero had turned nun if it had not been for a hot midsummer night, for, good youth, he went but forth to wash him in the Hellespont and, being taken with the cramp, was drowned; and the foolish chroniclers of that age found it was Hero of Sestos. But these are all lies. Men have died from time to time, and worms have eaten them, but not for love."

Jonathan Crow, the first, “bad”, love interest, reminds me so much of that most dangerous of young men (of whom I am sure we can all think of examples) – the bright, self-absorbed, self-performing romantic – the guy who can write you love poems, claim to suffer for love of you, though he is incapable of actually recognising your existence – when you drop everything to throw yourself into his arms (as he has begged for weeks) you find his back is turned, his shoulders hunched...The “you” he loved was a god of his own creation. We are meant to see, I think, similarities between the "love" he and Teresa "feel" - it is all about the lover, and never the object.

And yet, there is a kind of feminism in his thinking which is quite correct, and ahead of its time, though it is mixed with and quickly overpowered by his misogyny and racism. He is, by the time they meet again in London, an asshole of quite extraordinary proportions. Nevertheless his admiration for Teresa shows he understands something of the restrictions placed on young women, and the strength she has demonstrated in fighting against it. We are told “In one speech he would be sardonic and naive, cruel and gay, tender and cold” and, for a young and inexperienced woman full of self doubt, this is a dangerous combination. So often in the reading one finds oneself just wishing Teresa would find some confidence in herself, instead of assuming that she must be wrong, that the male idol of her making is infallible...

What Stead is great at, I think, is capturing this sort of psychological complexity of character - which remains sadly rare in fiction. As in our real lives, we generalise and ignore inconsistency and contradiction just to make things easier to deal with...One can quite easily be a feminist and a misogynist at the same time...We can say all the right things at all the right times and then still treat our lover like complete shit. The 18-year-old me was certainly guilty of this at times.

And, of course, without giving anything away, the "good" lover at the end is seriously flawed, and her realisations about the reality of married life are very far from the usual endings of such stories...What Stead posits as a possible solution to the problems of women such as Teresa remains radical even today.

It helps, too, that her prose is constructed with great art and skill.
I quote the lengthy excerpt below, from about page 70, for two reasons:

(1) It was where I realised just how impressive this book was; and
(2) It gives a good indication of the naive but powerful female sexuality at play - the danger and excitement of all this...



It was high tide at nine-thirty that night in February and even after ten o’clock the black tide was glassy, too full for lapping in the gullies. Up on the cliffs, Teresa could see the ocean flooding the reefs outside, chocking the headlands and swimming to the landing platforms of jetties in the bays. It was long after ten when Teresa got to the highest point of the seaward cliffs and turning there, dropped down to the pine-grown bay by narrow paths and tree-grown boulders, trailing her long skirt, holding her hat by a ribbon. From every moon-red shadow came the voices of men and women; in every bush and in the clumps of pine, upon unseen wooden seats and behind rocks, in the grass and even on open ledges, men and women groaned and gave shuddering cries as if they were being beaten. She passed slowly, timidly, but fascinated by the strange battlefield, the bodies stretched out, contorted, with sounds of the dying under the fierce high moon. She did not know what the sounds were, but she knew children would be conceived this night, and some time later women would marry hurriedly, if they could, like one of her cousins, who had slept the night with a man in one of these very grottoes; and perhaps one or two would jump in the sea. There were often bodies fished up round here, that had lepth when the heart still beat, from these high ledges into waters washed round these rocks by the moon.
.
.
.
In this hot night, not only the rocks above her, half-naked among twisted, tooth-leaved trees and spiney bushes, but the little open park she was now approaching, the grass above the dripping rocks of the military reserve, and the tram-shelters, were full of semitones and broken whispers. The roots, the trees, the timbers of the houses, stained by storms, the back yards full of plasterers' rubbish, the niches in the stony undercliff were refuges of love.

She came out from the lane, crossed the road and skirted the park. Near the seesaw, on the short grass, lay a black shape, unmoving. When she passed it, she saw it was a man over a woman, the woman's white gloves and bag lay on the grass beside them. They caught pickpockets in the Bay. Near the Old Hotel two more, the woman on her back and the man on his elbow, lay looking into each other's eyeballs, reflecting the moon. There were none of them on the beach tonight, drowned under the high tide; none in the boats drawn up across the footpath. People sat in their moist warm gardens, talking and hitting out at the mosquitoes: the smell of eucalyptus oil and pipe-smoke reached out. Across the harbour, on the oyster-coloured water, a large Manly ferry full of lights moved southwards toward the city. She felt the swarm of lovers thick as locusts behind her when she turned into the beach path. Tied up to the fourth pile of the wharf was a rowing boat covered with a tarpaulin. Under the tarpaulin was a woman's body: she had been fished out of the sea just outside of the cliffs that afternoon; it did not cause much comment. They lived there, among the gardens of the sea, and knew their fruits: fish, storms, corpses. moontides, miracles."


(note the almost Woolfian thought-intrusion in the short sentence about pickpockets..)

Angela Carter thought it a masterpiece, and was a big fan of Stead's work. Hopefully that will convince you to give her a try, though do not let The Man Who Loved Children (or some of its reviews on this site) distract you from the brilliance of the rest of her work. I have read 4 of her novels now and will certainly be reading more...

[Rosemary Atwell · Rating 3 out of 5]

A passionately argued and often bleak examination of the nature of love by the wonderful Christina Stead. Read it for her evocative descriptions of place, her unsympathetic but remarkable characters and the relentless force of her hard, clean intellect.

[Richard · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is the third novel I've read by Christina Stead. Her writing is fierce, intense and exhausting and her characters are vivid and sometimes grotesque. This novel conveys an amazing impression of Sydney in the thirties and provides a very rich portrayal of the difficulties and frustrations faced by a young, intelligent and sexually aware woman in that era. A great Australian novel, in my opinion (though maybe not for the faint-hearted).

[Lily · Rating 5 out of 5]

this was a painful but important read. there were parts i read and read again before moving on, and i'll probably read it again sometime... although the end left me feeling cold somehow. i think i liked this book best when teresa's suffering was at its worse, mainly because it felt like surely she was one step away from giving jonathon crow a whack in the face. ultimately i realised he's just too stupidly cynical and emotionally vacant for anything to have that much of an impact on him anyway and so it felt okay to leave him to his miserable half-life and just be grateful she escaped

[Adrian K. · Rating 5 out of 5]

She was brushing out her hair when she heard him stir, and still brushing she came to the bed and looked down at him, smiling. He sprang up with a “Hullo”, and took her in his arms. They felt a glow of simple happiness, without transport, almost without desire, which was like a heartfelt recognition of each other, a kind of inward smile. Teresa held him close for a moment and thought to herself: “This is life and death.” —Christina Stead, For Love Alone (pp. 488-489)

This novel is so amazing and so many different things that it is difficult to put into words. It is about the nature of love—both actual love and its philosophical parody, which is only a form of self-love, in the negative sense of that term.

It is also about class. Both protagonists, Teresa and Jonathan, are poor yet intelligent, and so find retreat from the brutality of life and their lack of opportunities in the sanctuary of ideas—Teresa in Romantic and libertine notions of love, Jonathan in Marxism and eugenics. Their choices are not without significance. Teresa affirms love obessively, absolutely, wheras Jonathan denies it, regarding it all as merely an ‘accident of evolution’. The novel’s epigraph, taken from Don Quixote, is significant here. That her name may be a reference to St. Teresa of Avila is also worth considering.

It is also about gender. Teresa is using her ideas to break free of the limitations imposed upon her society; Jonathan, on the other hand, is using his ideas to deny life, including Teresa’s love for him, through the compelling yet incorrect view that the only reasonable response that the world deserves is his own defiant self-destruction. It is the dream of absolute freedom from others, which is the fatal error to which philosophy often tends, and from which Teresa breaks free, only through the love of another. Jonathan, on the other hand, rejects Teresa’s love (and the love of several other women he deliberately deceived) and for that reason can find no way out of his self-constructed prison. If Teresa had not be rescued by another—if her fortress of ideas had not been disrupted by this unassimilable input—she would also likely have remained trapped in her mind like Jonathan; more than once she considers throwing herself into the Thames, until she is ‘saved’. She is not a model for us, but the path she trod is instructive, and intuits much of the Christian conception of love, which is romance ordered.

In short, this novel is profound. It is the best book I’ve read this year so far, and I may have discovered a new favourite author. This is my first Stead, but I’m hooked. The comparison to D. H. Lawrence is quite accurate, but I think there is something quite different in Stead too, greater humanity and less hate than in Lawrence, who is more like Jonathan than Teresa—whereas Teresa was based on Stead herself (and Jonathan, too, was based on a real person too, with whom Stead was briefly involved, the Australian philosopher W. G. K. Duncan).

Brilliant, brilliant, brilliant.

[Highlyeccentric · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really do not know what to make of this book. I mean. What.

Things that stood out about it:

- For the first half, the scenic descriptions of Sydney were spot on. So spot on. Consider this one. That's the main reason I read the book, I was promised modernist sense of place, so I guess it wins on that score.

- Good lord Christina Stead's descriptions of the depressed cynical prospectless academic dude. It's like she predicted my terrible taste in men well in advance of my birth.

- In theory, I think I approve of this book in the way it embraces female sexuality and desire. However, I am not without reservations.

Things that were weird about this book:

- Its treatment of homosexuality. The subject wasn't mentioned at all until England, whereupon Jonathan's willingness to countenance the idea of male-male relations is used as proof of his corruption and misogyny. I mean. His opinions are a pretty plausible hash of the opinions of the likes of the Society of the Special, who did see m/m homosexuality as the pinnacle of patriarchal achievement, so... But I found myself reading him as a closeted bisexual, too afraid to approach homosexuality in anything but theory, and unable to have genuine relationships with women partly in consequence. Which, I'm pretty sure, was not the reading Christina Stead wanted me to take.

- The final love plot was very ???. I really don't think it sounded terribly healthy, the de facto husband fellow was a bit of a wet blanket, and the whole adultery plot was both hilarious and bizarre. (I mean, if I ever need a great one-page excerpt to illustrate the exchange of women as male homosocial bonding, I know where to go!) And it was all very... it's like Stead didn't know what to DO and rushed the ending, or something. Very odd. Still, I like the idea that the time to fall in love with your pseudo-husband is after some strategic adultery.

[Andrew]

As with The Man Who Loved Children, it took me a really long time to get into For Love Alone. I enjoyed it, but I didn't feel like anything was working towards any kind of resolution, and it just seemed more and more like a long gripe session, largely involving a relationship with a blowhard named Jonathan Crow (whom I just imagined as current blowhard-du-jour Jordan Peterson) as he pontificates about "the female mind" or whatever. Then a big-dick chad comes in and swoops his girl, and while it could have turned out like a Harlequin romance, it totally didn't.

I get why Stead is rarely read now. She doesn't fit the market. She was a grumpy Marxist who wrote about how men and women have great difficulty understanding one another, and about how most of our social niceties are utter crocks of shit. Furthermore, she does so over the span of lengthy novels that take a while to unfold. She deserves a revival.

[Mark · Rating 5 out of 5]

This, I believe, is one of the greatest pieces of Australian literature ever written. Its scope and timlessness is superb, and its structure is astounding.

[Kathryn · Rating 5 out of 5]

Absolutely brilliant tale of a highly-strung young woman who allows herself to be lead-on by a sour misogynist.

[Christina Houen · Rating 5 out of 5]

For Love Alone was Christina Stead’s fifth novel, written after The Man Who Loved Children, her more famous book, and published in 1945. It is, for me, a memorable book, one I first read many years ago and have never forgotten. Set in Sydney and London, it tells of the emergence into womanhood of Teresa Hawkins, and her quest for love. The opening chapters give us vivid pictures of Teresa’s family home, dominated by Andrew, her vain, selfish, self-obsessed, narcissistic father, who is an Antipodean 20th-century version of the patriarchal, hollow father, Sir Walter, in Jane Austen’s novel, Persuasion. And like Anne Elliot, Teresa dreams of love, not a love lost, like Anne’s, but love as an ideal, a passionate devotion that transcends marriage but, in this 1930s provincial world of Sydney, is only achievable through marriage. Like Anne in Persuasion, Teresa is not understood in her family: her father sees her as cold, obstinate, unwomanly, unlike her sister Kitty, “A woman’s woman, a womanly little girl, pretty, humble, sweet…”. Whereas Teresa has “no attraction for a man as you are now, and it might be better if you knew how to lure men.” Her elder brother Lance joins his father in ridiculing her, while Leo, ‘a dark, rosy boy,” admires her. Teresa considers her family her enemies, though she looks after Leo when he sleepwalks at night (he is trapped too, and she encourages him to leave home) and she and Kitty have a sisterly understanding despite their very different natures. At the meal table, 19-year-old Teresa utters her manifesto, addressing the patriarch, the ineffectual head of the family:

I am informed, on the moral side. You’re ignoble. You can’t understand me. Henceforth, everything between us is a misunderstanding. You have accepted compromise, you revel in it. Not me. I will never compromise.

After roaring with laughter, Andrew says, “Eat your soup and don’t be a fool.”

With scorn and bitterness, Teresa rejects her father’s sermon about love and swears she will kill him if he insults her.

Base coward, hitting your children when they’re small, insulting them when they’re big and saying you’re their father.

He subdues her ‘hysteria’ with a terrifying roar, reducing her to abject tears.

So we can see what Teresa is up against in her struggle to define herself as a woman. In so many ways, I see this picture as a reflection of the bourgeois family that I and so many women were born into. Yet my childhood was a generation or two later, and my mother had a university degree, a higher education that few women in her generation had. I had opportunities Teresa did not have. I finished my secondary education and went to university, whereas Teresa went to teacher’s college and taught a class of disabled children whom none of the other teachers wanted, and who were reviled and beaten by the headmaster. I married young, to an ambitious scientist, and followed his wake across the world for a while. I did not find love. The marriage fell apart and I lost my children. I don’t think I was as obstinate or idealistic as Teresa, and I compromised too much… but that was my learning curve.

She emerges from the shadows of her family, leaves her teaching job, falls in love with a young man who has studied his way out of his working class background and won a scholarship to an English university. He teaches her Latin and gives lectures on free love, and she comes to idolise him and determines to follow him to England. So she works in a factory for five years and starves herself almost to death, walking from the inner city industrial suburb to the Quay every day to catch the ferry home to the shell of her family home, wearing only one dress which she washes overnight and patches, and shoes with rubber soles that don’t wear out so fast.

When she arrives in London, as the reader expects, she learns, in painful episodes, that her idol has feet of clay. Though they have corresponded all these years, and he has intimated they may travel together and live together, he treats her with a mixture of kindness and cruelty, with the cruelty increasing. And eventually the scales fall from her eyes and she sees him as he is, a misogynistic, bitter, neurotic, self-obsessed man who is incapable of love.

The resolution is an unexpected deus ex machina, in the form of the man who gives her her first job in London. I won’t describe their relationship. In trite terms, it would be ‘love and happiness ever after,’ but in fact, it is a fascinating mix of romantic themes and proto-feminist, marxist choices, and the ending is, to say the least, unresolved.

In trying to summarise Teresa’s progress through idealistic, sublimated love to a surprisingly modern compromise, I have left out much of the fascination of Stead’s writing. Her descriptions of Sydney, of the harbour, of the working class inner city suburbs, of the city itself, of the dense, intense, messy lives of those who inhabit these places, of London and the residential streets of the boarding houses and cafes and more up-market areas, the excursions into the country, and more, are superb tours de forces, that take you there and make you wonder if you will ever come out again. You could get caught in any one of these scenes and frozen in time. Such is the power of her writing!

[Noah Melser · Rating 5 out of 5]

Intelligent and interesting Teresa searching beyond the closed suburban home in early mid 20th century. Despite the beautiful descriptions of 30s Sydney at night, with the pale moon, men sitting quietly on park benches and the gentle rustling in the yards, I was so fed up by 300 pages in. So much weight on everything. Unceasing. But Teresa is a top quality character, and the building of it all is needed. What a bursting story. It's funny considering the pared back prose and freedom, relatively anyway, of Astley's characters only 20 or so years later. But such good writing, characters so well done, streetscapes, landscapes, interiors filled with beauty. Damn good.

[Cheryl · Rating 3 out of 5]

I can't rate this one as high as "The Man Who Loved Children" (by the same author) for lack of virtuosity and Jonathan Crow is absolutely insufferable, but I do think it is interesting how this novel depicts a female heroic journey, especially since it was written before the rise of women's lib.

[Susan Steggall · Rating 3 out of 5]

It is fascinating to see how writing 'styles' change over generations. Stead's prose is rich in detail and description - rather too rich I found in the contemporary mindset for stripped-down prose and rigid adherence to separation of points of view (Stead often swaps these within the same paragraph). The coming of age of Theresa Hawkins is an extraordinary exploration of a young woman's physical, emotional and sexual being. The reader is led into every nook and cranny of her mind and heart often to the point of exhaustion. The men in Theresa's life are interesting for their old-fashioned attitudes to women - attitudes that were perhaps irritating although common when Stead wrote the book in the 1940s, but are almost unpalatable to 21st-century readers.

It has taken me much longer to read than most books I attempt and I was tempted to abandon it several times. However I am pleased to have finished it, not the least for the evocative rendering of 1930s' Sydney when Watsons Bay was little more than a fishing village. Reading Drusilla Modjeska's introduction AFTER i finished the novel, gave me additional insights into Stead's gift as a writer.

[Pablo · Rating 5 out of 5]

I discovered Christina Stead's name in a collection of essays by Angela Carter and was intrigued by the delight and awe shown towards her subject (of the sort usually reserved for William Burroughs, hey ..). Like Alasdair Gray's Lanark, For Love Alone is *two*, two books in one: the Sydney half plays like 'I Capture the Castle' under the hard stamp of experience .. which will only intensify when our heroine Teresa Hawkins begins a new life on the other side of the world. Stead's keen eye captures withering, occasionally hilarious, portraits and psychologies: of Teresa herself, of the moody and irresponsible Jonathan Crow (who passes through its pages like some gaseous D.H. Lawrence construction), and American Businessman in London Mr. Quick. For Love Alone is a beautiful and unflinching achievement.

[Patrdr · Rating 3 out of 5]

Three-quarters of the way through and the main thing is that the main characters are two of the most irritating people I've met in a story. We'll see what happens. I like some redemption in a tale but I'm feeling gloomy about this one.

To be continued.....

Well, I can't say much changed. The most irritating of the two characters was supplanted by one somewhat less annoying.

My problem with the book may be that I found the thoughts and motivations of the characters hard to imagine. The story is set in the 1930's, starting in Australia and shifting to London. It unfolds largely in the observations and thoughts of the characters. It begins with a grim view of marriage and conventional relationships. E.g.: “Nothing to wear but clothes, nothing to eat but food, nowhere to sleep but bed, nothing to marry but men, nowhere to go but home,” mused Aunt Bea. “Nothing to do but live. My poor feet! Now I know where the shoe pinches.”
The heroine is young, idealistic and ill-treated by her family and the school at which she teaches. When she leaves them behind, they are well and truly gone, never making another appearance in the book or her thoughts as they are revealed to us. She follows a shallow and callous man to England.
She is sort of redeemed through a more decent fellow though in the end, (does this merit a spoiler alert? There is so little tension in the book it seems odd to think of a climax being spoiled with a tip-off.) this seems to be an open marriage from which she can explore love and men, while keeping this secret from the husband. She has overcome those limitations that hobbled her at the start of the story. "Most young women are surprised to find themselves with a lover at all; the oblique remarks and casual slurs of relatives, the naked domestic drama and hate of parent and child, lead them to the belief that love does not exist, that it is a flare-up between the sexes, a fever, or a nugget which must be capitalized as soon as found." On the other hand "she was not at all satisfied with the end of physical craving: she wanted to try men."

[Kat Ashworth · Rating 5 out of 5]

A profound book, delving into the nature of love and sex from a rough and heavy hand of the internal moral landscape. Given it’s setting of 1930’s Australia and 1940’s London there are perspectives on the subject matter which clearly illuminate the era. However at the root of the story telling is an ageless ness which explores the terror and the ecstasy, forbidden territory and the selfs need for acceptance or rebellion by societies status quo.

Granted this book could take a little to get into. Stead has been intentionally vague about time and place. It is indeed a story telling through psycho analysis. And well worth pushing through as the character releases the shackles of self suffering and isolation, to find a new freedom, for Love alone, the one true master.

[Ben Payne · Rating 5 out of 5]

Christina Stead sure can write! This is the exact opposite of a quick, easy read. Her writing is complex, her characters deep, often contradicting themselves or saying what they don’t mean. It’s the kind of book to slowly savour rather than race through. Sometimes the characters behave terribly, but they’re never less than three dimensional and at the end it’s hard not to feel like you’ve read something real, messy but genuine.

[Albertine67 · Rating 4 out of 5]

Teresa's life was one I could have lived (and did, in parts), but I think Stead's writing and insight is such that most readers would feel the same, despite the extremity of the situations and feelings. Teresa's vulnerability and awkwardness are so accurately and painfully wrought that I had to stop reading at times; very close to the bone. An unsentimental but compassionate rendering of a life.

[Ruth · Rating 3 out of 5]

Weird characters. Being well written I pushed into it and started enjoying the flow. The struggle between the main character's inner workings and her behaviour interested me. Worth finishing.

[Susan Holmes · Rating 5 out of 5]

Both horrifying and fascinating

[Darcy Edwards · Rating 2 out of 5]

Stead knows how to drag out a book. I liked it until I didn’t. Tess went boy crazy🤪. Loved historical Sydney though.

[David Mitchell · Rating 1 out of 5]

Two things made this novel a painful experience: I) Jonathan Crow was intolerable & II) I am repulsed by fiction where the author introduces a major character toward the very end (Quick).