Rating: 
Summary: PHEW!
Review: Well-written junk. Pinkies up porn. Supposed to be Victorian but the changing point of view and pace are out of "Moll Flanders" and "Tom Jones" without the charm and wit.
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Summary: A review on 'Look Inside'
Review: I got to know about this book from Time magazine,where it was described as a book 'better than ...' !And since then I am trying to know more about the book before I buy it.In the review section we get to know so many opinions which encourage as well as discourage at the same time.I went through the 'Look into' section provided here.And to be honest I felt sick reading even these few pages. I do agree with the opinion of P.A. Brown.
May be its a great novel,but its like being pushed into a gutter filled of bodily fluids,sweat..
Rating:
Summary: Disappointing, after great reviews
Review: I had wanted to like this book a lot after reading several excellent reviews. I feel like I was reading a different bookj---one with, yes, fascinating details of daily life I had not known before, but not much else. An editor was much needed for this book----as it appears to be unedited. Repetitive, slow, and dreadly uninteresting at times, the book needs a good 300 pages cut from it. The slash and burn would not be difficult as the author drones on and one.I won't. But I also will not recommend this book to others.
Rating: 
Summary: artfully expressed....
Review: i found myself enthralled with the characters & their multitude of distresses... but found the ending to be rather abrupt & unfulfilling.
Rating: 
Summary: Perhaps surprisingly, it also has moral depth
Review: As a religion professor, I found the moral undercurrents particularly noteworthy; and I also found the portrayal of Victorian religiosity of great interest. Superficial spirituality is condemned; mere culture-religion receives a thrashing. But some of the religious do-gooders are portrayed in a more ambiguous light--e.g., Emmeline Foxe, certainly, and even her boyfriend. One wishes the author would deepen the ambiguity and complexify the picture by taking the story up to the great 20th-c. Anglo-Catholic priests in the slums, who did have an impact and who were driven by their eucharistic piety. One thinks of Austin Farrer's exemplar of the Christian life, Hugh Lister, for example, an Anglo-Catholic priest who led labor strikes in the East End of London in the 1930s and who died in combat as a Welsh Guards officer in WW II.
Rating:
Summary: You need a lot of patience...
Review: You need a lot of patience to get even remotely involved in this book. Two hundred pages into it and I was still ready to throw it in the bin (notwithstanding the author's teasing remarks along the way that it will get more interesting). Honestly, it doesn't get that much more interesting. The characters are not likable so you don't really care what happens to them. However, I did finish it but did not feel satsified with the conclusion.
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Summary: The story is a banquet of sounds, smells, characters
Review: I read a lot of books, and this one was really hard to put down. I was up in the middle of the night and let some of my day responsibilities take second seat. The story is rich with all matter of the period of London, from smells, street scenes, the social atmosphere, the sexual mores, etc. I felt the characters were real people who I cared about. I was very sorry to finish the book and wanted to know more, hoping for a sequel. The book is rich in detail, social strata fact, and the author gets into the minds of the characters and helps us to put on the "feel" of being a person living in that time, on those streets, with those social restraints, the medical ineptness, and brings the smells of the time and how they related to everything in daily life in such full luscious detail. I loved it for its set of time and place, its astounding character portrayals, its sense of the mind of each character, man or woman, and how that life at that time treated them and subsequently how I can view it from the year 2002. I miss picking that book up and reading it daily. I miss the characters. I miss feeling the time of the books story while I am so glad we have evolved from that point. This book is just simply a banquet of sensual delights.
Rating:
Summary: Don't let the size of this book put you off
Review: I bought this book on a Friday and finished it by Monday. It is a very quick read despite its 800 plus pages. In a nutshell, this is an excellent book-handsdown, one of the best I have read this year. While there is no doubt that Mr. Faber certainly did his research for this book in portraying Victorian London as it really was-warts and all or rather smells and all, the best part of this book is the characters. All of them, even the 'minor' ones like the Yorkshire-born Caroline come across as so real and multi-dimensional. Although Sugar was heroine of this novel, I was very much drawn to the other main female characters namely Emmaline Fox and William's mentally-ill wife, Agnes. As one reader wrote, sometimes you felt you wanted to slap Agnes silly while at other times you couldn't help but feel sorry for this poor woman's miserable life. Faber also does a good job in fleshing out the male characters like William's elder brother the long-suffering Henry. Even William, as amoral and arrogant as he was, was strangely compelling. I guess my only grip is I wanted to know what became of Sugar & Sophie at the end. Although I really was pulling for Sugar to 'beat the odds' so to speak and carve out her own niche in life, there was still a nagging voice in my head which made me doubt that Sugar would ever leave her past completely behind her. What does she do next? My only guess is that maybe Faber leaves it up to the individual reader to decide.
Rating:
Summary: Just a correction for the correction
Review: Perhaps the reviewer who said that Michel Farber is a woman should take a look at the picture of him in a recent Time magazine article. He appears rather male to me.
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Summary: Michel Faber is a Man
Review: Great book - but I have to correct an earlier reader who wanted americans to know that Michel Faber is a woman. Mr. Faber is pictured with his book cover in the previous edition of Time Magazine. And he is clearly not a female. September 16th edition if anyone wants to verify.
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