★★★★★ 4
Timeless Classic With Lots of Surprises
I read Emma for an English class many years ago. I remembered that I'd enjoyed it and as I approach the big 7-0, I thought that I would read it again. Surprisingly, I found it to be more ponderous than I'd remembered it. Lots of beating a topic to death. Endless sentences (but then that's Jane Austen!). There were many days and nights when I'd fall asleep while reading. But, all in all, Emma kept me coming back to the story. Never wanted to give up on it. Emma has her flaws, but in my opinion she isn't half as bad as many reviewers make her out to be. She's manipulative but in the spirit of wanting the best for a friend. She enjoys matchmaking as she believes that this is the closest she will get to romantic love, that her duties to her elderly father preclude any romance for herself.
Much of the joy of this book for me was that there is more to it than just the typical characteristics of an Austen novel--finding romance in a world of rigid class distinctions and wealth disparities. This book contains all of this, but also plays up the idiosyncrasies of people which have nothing to do with class or wealth--such things as food preferences, desire for home life over social life, aversion to certain types of weather, and a tendency to talk almost continuously about virtually nothing. These parts of the novel are some of my favorites because some of the characters with their phobias and addictions remind me of people in my family so it's a truly entertaining aspect for me.
I was very pleased with the ending. Jane Austen ties things up neatly. She's not like so many of our modern writers today who are in love with the ambiguous ending (I've read many such books and have enjoyed them), but it's so nice to read an old-fashioned story occasionally and to know that it's all going to work out and that you may even cry as I did at some of the touching, romantic parts at the end (even though there was not so much as a kiss!), Austen has a way of communicating deep emotion. The couple can deeply move the reader, just in the way they look at one another or join hands.
Even though the ending is satisfying, the book keeps us on edge and makes us wonder how it will all work out to everyone's satisfaction. Lots of plot twists and surprises. You'll feel for the characters and long for them to find love.
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Reviewed in the United States on July 12, 2016
