Still She Haunts Me by Katie Roiphe Summary and Reviews
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Book Reviews of Still She Haunts Me
Book Review: Creeped me out!
Summary: 2 Stars
While I agree that the writing style was interesting and that the subject was engaging, this book gave me the creeps. I couldn't get past the feeling that I was reading about a man who was one step away from being a pedophile. He was already a stalker; given more opportunity, I could see him moving past obsession into inappropriate action. Now, before somebody says, "You have a dirty mind," let me say that I am the mother of two daughters, and I would never allow a family acquaintance of the opposite sex to have the access to and familiarity with my daughters that Dodgson/Carroll had with Alice. Whether Roiphe's novel was more history or more novel, I don't know; she certainly seems qualified to handle the subject. However, I felt dirty for having even read the book!Book Review: Great Book
Summary: 5 Stars
I throughly enjoyed this book. It is one of the better novels that I have read of late. The characters roped you into thier world. Very hard to put down.Book Review: Interesting novel about people who have dissolved into legends
Summary: 4 Stars
I don't think that any of us will ever know the truth about Lewis Carroll's relationship with the real Alice. This fictionalized account of their story, however, is aptly named. The legend and this story will also haunt the reader. Though a newer novel--Alice I Have Been--skirts around the idea of sexual abuse, this book confronts that supposition head on.
Many critics have relegated Carroll to simply being a member of the Victorian cult of the child. Perhaps he was. Perhaps he simply craved the remembered but untouchable unknown of his youth, finding a way to recover it in Alice and other little girls (for more about this, see Robson's Men in Wonderland). It is possible and the idea of men recovering childhood through relationships with children certainly comes up often enough in Victorian novels. We will never know, but I am happy that this author doesn't try to run away from the possibility that the author of one of the best-known stories could have been a sexual deviant. In the end, regardless of what happened that resulted in Carroll being barred from the Liddell home, this novel is an artistic and well-written story that succeeds beyond the usual biofic.
Book Review: Just silly
Summary: 1 Stars
It's not 'well-written'. It's not 'based on real historical events', and it most certainly tells us nothing about the real Lewis Carroll.If you would like to know about the much more interesting reality that this silly cotton-candy book obscures then buy a good biography or go to a good website like Looking for Lewis Carroll (www.lookingforlewiscarroll.com).
But DON'T imagine you can read this and be reading history.
It's intellectual junk food for the terminally dumb.
Book Review: Katie Roiphe's Still She Haunts Me
Summary: 4 Stars
Katie Roiphe's novel, Still She Haunts Me, is about Lewis Carroll's relationship with Alice Pleasance Liddell, the young girl who was Carroll's inspiration for Alice in Wonderland and its sequel, Through the Looking Glass. This novel is both well-researched and well-written. Using excerpts from Carroll's own diaries, letters and poetry, Ms. Roiphe creates a fictional tapestry of infatuation, guilt-ridden obsession and latent pedophilia. The novel's title is from Carroll's acrostic poem spelling out Alice's full name.
Ms. Roiphe's fictional Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (Carroll's real name) is a masterwork of character development. He is a man of the Victorian Era - moralistic, somewhat intolerant of others' perceived moral failings, and tortured by his own fantasies and weaknesses. His character is sympathetically-drawn throughout much of the book, necessarily becoming pathetic and ultimately something beyond pathos toward the book's end. To Ms. Roiphe's credit, the book is tasteful and is beautifully-written. The prologue's analogy of Dodgson's yearning, horror and regret to that of Titania from A Midsummer Night's Dream as she comes out of her enchantment is nothing short of exquisite.
It is hard to swallow that a parent would allow a young adult male almost unrestricted daily access to a small child for any length of time, let alone seven years depicted in this book. The parental response, or lack thereof, to this unusual and disturbing relationship is the one flaw that I noted in this otherwise fine first novel.