Rating: 2/5
How words weave spells! As I wrote of the avenue, it rose before my eyes—I can see it now, lined with great smooth-branched trees where branches meet far above me. The still air is flooded with peace, yet somehow expectant—as it seemed to me once when I was in King’s Crypt Cathedral at sunset. On and on I wonder, beneath the vaulted roof of branch and leaf… and all the time, the avenue is yesterday, that long approach to beauty. Images in the mind, how strange they are…
I rate Dodie Smith’s I Capture the Castle 2 stars out of 5. The narrator Cassandra Mortmain’s self-piteous, oh-everyone-look-at-me-I’m-so-miserable outlook on life was sweet in the beginning before becoming consistently irritating and overdone. I got the impression when reading this book that I was supposed to pity Cassandra and relate to her problems, but really she just struck me as a tedious teenager ranting in her journal. Why don’t we round up all the tedious teenagers in the world and publish their journals and get worldwide acclaim for them? “Oh gosh, what a capital idea!” cries Cassandra. This is, overall, how I felt about this book.
On the other hand, the ranting was written quite well—that is, Smith manages to capture the soul of an angst-y 1930s teenager decently, and there was, perhaps, the essence of an underlying plot going on. While at the beginning it was interesting reading about Smith’s well-written landscape descriptions and other signs of a book of serious potential, by the end it had become a sentimental tale of a quintessentially British family who sit around in their castle overwhelmed by self-pity: a tragic story of sisterly betrayal and marrying people off for money. In other words, an uninteresting and tired plot, just written decently.