Innocent Blood
Decide its fate
The record
Time
An eveningA season354 pages, about 7 hours: about the length of a typical book on the shelf.
Getting in
Walk right inSteep climbPhilippa Palfrey, adopted as a child, turns eighteen and uses her legal right to learn who her birth parents are.
One of a kind
Others do thisNothing else doesRich Westwood at Past Offences likens its tone to Ruth Rendell’s novels.
The case for it
on the setup
“begins in the honorable novelistic tradition of the orphan’s search for the past”
Maureen Howard · The New York Times, 1980 on the setting
“a living, breathing world that the reader can disappear into”
a book blog on the pace
“an extraordinary slow burn”
a book blog on Hilda, the adoptive mother
“Hilda, her adoptive mother is the one that I really felt for”
a book blog
The case against
on the descriptive passages
“the narrative is interrupted by too-frequent lyrical descriptive passages”
Barbara Phillips · The Christian Science Monitor, 1980 on the artifice
“seems to mistrust her own art and run for the cover of artifice”
Maureen Howard · The New York Times, 1980 on the cultured voice
“everyone thinks and speaks in the same cultured voice”
a book blog on the characters
“an awful time in the company of bad people”
a book blog
