📚 2024 Reading #3

I really enjoyed reading Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell. It’s fantastical, it’s engrossing, it’s captivating. It’s long but really well-written, and I just felt like I was living in another world when I read it.

The plot is long, covering around ten years in this alternate history where magic is taken for granted. And it covers several separate threads, which tied together in a really satisfying way at the end.

The world is magical and yet really tangible. I can imagine being there, even in Faerie, so clearly. It’s set in the early 19th Century but I felt like I knew the world.

And the characters are real and rounded, they have natural progression over that time, and I found myself having strong feelings about various characters in the story. Not just Strange and Norrell but the others too, including ones who exist through legend like John Uskglass, rather than actually appearing as formed characters.

I couldn’t have enjoyed this book more.