{"id":317,"date":"2009-01-16T22:46:47","date_gmt":"2009-01-17T03:46:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lettersandsodas.com\/books\/?p=317"},"modified":"2009-01-16T22:46:47","modified_gmt":"2009-01-17T03:46:47","slug":"the-thirteenth-tale-by-diane-setterfieldatria-books-2006","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/the-thirteenth-tale-by-diane-setterfieldatria-books-2006\/","title":{"rendered":"The Thirteenth Tale by Diane SetterfieldAtria Books, 2006"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>This is a story of neo-Gothic intrigue, the story of a decaying pile of a mansion and the falling-apart family that lives in it, a story of reading and writing. In the first few pages I decided it had a few things going for it: the reference to <em>The Water Babies<\/em> (yay classic kids&#8217; books) on page four, the revelation, on page thirteen, that it&#8217;s set in Cambridge (England, not Massachusetts), so I could picture the river and the punts and the little street where the antiquarian bookshop where the protagonist works would be. I wanted this book to be smarter, less pop-fiction and more literary-fiction&#8212;but that didn&#8217;t keep me from not wanting to put it down. It turned out to be very good to read during a week of all-day meetings at work, the kind of week where I take notes all day long and then get on the train and just want to get lost in a <em>story<\/em>, the kind I don&#8217;t mind reading a little too quickly because I&#8217;m reading for plot, really, not for beautiful\/original language or new ideas. It&#8217;s the kind of book where, even reading too quickly, there were revelations I could see coming (but at least one that I didn&#8217;t); it&#8217;s the kind of book where, if things sometimes felt flat, I just read faster, to get to the next plot twist, and enjoyed it all the while.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>This is a story of neo-Gothic intrigue, the story of a decaying pile of a mansion and the falling-apart family that lives in it, a story of reading and writing. In the first few pages I decided it had a few things going for it: the reference to The Water Babies (yay classic kids&#8217; books) [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-317","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fiction"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/317","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=317"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/317\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=317"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=317"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=317"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}