I loved everything about this one. The style, the characters. JK Rowling said the character of seventeen-year-old Cassandra Mortmain is "one of the most charismatic narrators" she'd ever met--and I concur.
It's the 1930s, and Cassandra, living with her family in a decrepit English castle, is keeping a journal. Her father may be going mad, her stepmother sometimes roams the country nude to commune with nature, the servant who has been raised with her shows all the signs of being infatuated, and her sister Rose swears to sell her soul to the devil if it means breaking out of their mortifying poverty. Temptation arrives in the person of two American heirs to lands that include the castle.
If all that makes this sound like one of those madcap romantic comedies filled with eccentrics--well, while it's quite funny in places, it's a lot more than that. Each of those characters is real and endearing, Cassandra is a credible teenager who relates her growing pains with insight and poignancy in a lovely, lyrical style with plenty of quotable lines. First published in 1948, despite period details, this doesn't feel the least bit dated. Among the novel's pleasures are depictions of Americans and Englishmen and their differences without falling into stereotypes, and as you might expect from the author of Hundred and One Dalmations, there is a cat and dog in the picture (Heloise and Abelard) as winning as any human character. There are also allusions to Jane Austen and Charlotte Bronte that are far from incidental. This is more bittersweet than Austen's novels, but I think this is one book Austen fans might appreciate. It has that ability to make someone grin madly on one page and feel a lump in the throat on the next.
