Essex Serpent (Perry) - Book Reviews

Book Reviews
Sarah Perry ‘s exquisite novel evokes of the best of 19th-century fiction — descriptive power, lush imagery, and vivid characters, especially females. The spirits of Austen, Bronte, Dickens, Hardy, and Eliot are alive and well within its pages.… It was hard to close the cover of The Essex Serpent when I finished; I didn’t want — I don’t want — to leave its world of earthy smells and wonderful characters. Sarah Perry has written a breathtaking book (and won the British National Book Award for it), and I’m eager to see what comes next. READ MORE …
Molly Lundquist - LitLovers

Sarah Perry's The Essex Serpent is a novel of almost insolent ambition — lush and fantastical, a wild Eden behind a garden gate. Set in the Victorian era, it's part ghost story and part natural history lesson, part romance and part feminist parable. It's wonderfully dense and serenely self-assured.
Jennifer Senior - New York Times Book Review


An irresistible new novel…the most delightful heroine since Elizabeth Bennet in Pride and Prejudice.… By the end, The Essex Serpent identifies a mystery far greater than some creature "from the illuminated margins of a manuscript": friendship.
Washington Post


Richly enjoyable.… Ms. Perry writes beautifully and sometimes agreeably sharply.… The Essex Serpent is a wonderfully satisfying novel. Ford Madox Ford thought the glory of the novel was its ability to make the reader think and feel at the same time. This one does just that.
Wall Street Journal


For originality, richness of prose and depth of characterization is unlikely to be bettered this year.… [O]ne of the most memorable historical novels of the past decade.
Sunday Times (UK)


Perry’s achieved the near impossible.…A thing of beauty inside and out …a stunning achievement.
Independent (UK)


Irresistible.… [Y]ou can feel the influences of Mary Shelley, Bram Stoker, Wilkie Collins, Charles Dickens and Hilary Mantel channeled by Perry in some sort of Victorian seance. This is the best new novel I’ve read in years.
Daily Telegraph (UK)


A Victorian-era gothic with a Dickensian focus on societal ills, Perry’s second novel surprises in its wonderful freshness.… [Her] singular characters are drawn with a fondness that is both palpable and contagious, all making for pure pleasure.
Observer (UK)


A suspenseful love story… The Essex Serpent recalls variously the earthiness of Emily Brontë, the arch, high-tensile tone of Conan Doyle, the evocation of time and place achieved by Hilary Mantel and Sarah Waters and the antiquarian edgelands horror of M. R. James.
New Statesman (UK)


Perry fully inhabits many of the concerns and stylistic elements of the 19th century novel — but its interests are still contemporary ones: desire, fulfillment and questioning the world… Her language is exquisite, her characterization finely tuned.… [I]t’s clear that Perry is a gifted writer of immense ability.
Irish Times


An exquisitely absorbing, old-fashioned page-turner.… The Essex Serpent is shot through with such a vivid, lively sense of the period that it reads like Charles Dickens at his most accessible and fans of Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell will also find much to love.
Daily Express (UK)


[E]xcellent.… Like John Fowles’s The French Lieutenant’s Woman, whose Lyme Regis setting gets a shout-out here, this is another period literary pastiche with a contemporary overlay. Cora makes for a fiercely independent heroine around whom all the other characters orbit.
Publishers Weekly


(Starred Review.) The vivid, often frightening imagery …and the lush descriptions …create a magical background for the sensual love story between Sarah and Will. Book-discussion groups will have a field day with the imagery, the well-developed characters, and the concepts of innocence, evil, and guilt.
Booklist


(Starred Review.) [S]weeping 19th-century saga of competing belief systems.… The sumptuous twists and turns of Perry's prose invite close reading….  Stuffed with smarts and storytelling sorcery, this is a work of astonishing breadth and brilliance.
Kirkus Reviews