{"id":161,"date":"2007-09-27T19:18:17","date_gmt":"2007-09-27T23:18:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lettersandsodas.com\/books-test\/?p=161"},"modified":"2007-09-27T19:18:17","modified_gmt":"2007-09-27T23:18:17","slug":"the-nature-of-monsters-by-clare-clarkharcourt-2007","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/the-nature-of-monsters-by-clare-clarkharcourt-2007\/","title":{"rendered":"The Nature of Monsters by Clare ClarkHarcourt, 2007"},"content":{"rendered":"

I read a post about The Nature of Monsters<\/i><\/a> over at A Work in Progress<\/a> a few months ago, and that description of the bookseller’s shop that Danielle quotes was enough to make me want to read it. I like how gripping the story is, and the boldness of its heroine, and of course I like the setting. There was a course I didn’t take in college called “London: From ‘Great Wen’ to World City,” and there’s definitely a sense in this book of Georgian London as a foul, filthy place, and a related sense of mistrust toward the city.<\/p>\n

But there’s also a sense of wonder about it, as when Eliza Tally, just come from a village outside Newcastle, catches sight of it from Hampstead Heath: “Beyond the hill it stretched away into forever, a glittering carpet of low black-tinted mist pierced by the sharpened points of innumerable spires and unrolled like a gift at my feet. London. And, in its center, triumphantly, rose up a mighty orbed mass, a dome of unimaginable majesty, its silvered patina shadowed with midnight’s inky blue. For all its immensity, it seemed to float above the city, borne up on a solemn wreath of cloud” (p 37).<\/p>\n

Clark’s writing is full of satisfying descriptive passages and clever dialogue, but there were some spots where I found repeated words or descriptions jarring or clunky: on page 233 there’s this: “the clouds were rosy strips, their bellies polished to gleaming copper,” and then on page 305 there it is again, the sun “polishing the bellies of the lingering clouds to gleaming copper.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I read a post about The Nature of Monsters over at A Work in Progress a few months ago, and that description of the bookseller’s shop that Danielle quotes was enough to make me want to read it. I like how gripping the story is, and the boldness of its heroine, and of course I […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-161","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fiction"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/161","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=161"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/161\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=161"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=161"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=161"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}