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Chargement... See What I Have Done (édition 2017)par Sarah Schmidt (Auteur)
Information sur l'oeuvreSee What I Have Done par Sarah Schmidt
Chargement...
Inscrivez-vous à LibraryThing pour découvrir si vous aimerez ce livre Actuellement, il n'y a pas de discussions au sujet de ce livre. When I began this book, I wasn't enjoying it and thought I should put it down. When I got to Part 2, the book picks up a ton and I really started to enjoy it more and more to the point I am excited to buy it once the book is released. This is the story of Lizzie Borden who, as legend goes, killed both her step mother and father with an ax and then called the police on herself. She supposedly killed them with tons of witnesses around and was released following her trial. She then moves back home and becomes an outcast to the town she lived in all her life. That is not a spoiler, but rather history. The book is told from various perspectives- Lizzie's, her sister Emma, the maid Bridget, the uncle, and her uncle's "friend"- Benjamin. Lizzie and the murders are obviously the center of this book, but the book gives a story that Lizzie wasn't involved in the murders and comes up with an alternative suspect, but it is hard to dismiss Lizzie. She has different stories, can't quite remember things well, and has a strange relationship with her sister-almost obsessive. It is the different perspectives that make the story fun. I gave this one 4 stars and will probably re-read it in its final format. Thank you to NetGalley for allowing me access to this book early. I received it in exchange for an honest review. For her debut novel, author Sarah Schmidt chose to tackle the famous Lizzie Borden case. More than a hundred years later, this double murder is still discussed and new theories are still be put forward. Although it becomes clear that the author strongly suspects Lizzie of killing her father and step-mother, she doesn’t settle the mystery but instead explores the characters around the murder and has the reader constantly wondering what does Lizzie know and what did she do. Lizzie and her sister Emma are ten years apart in age, with Lizzie being thirty-two and Emma forty-two at the time of the murders. Both sisters had problems with their controlling father and step-mother, but Emma was out of town at the time of the murders so Lizzie was the sister who came under suspicion. Lizzie also apparently had a history of instability. There was also Bridget, the maid, whose savings Mrs. Borden had taken, Uncle John, brother of the sister’s dead mother, who disapproved of how the sisters were being treated, and a stranger, Benjamin, hired by Uncle John, to set his brother-in-law straight. The story shifts perspective between the characters as the day of the murder is re-imagined, and we are drawn into this unhealthy family full of resentments and frustrations. The author writes in a very descriptive way, about the emotions, actions, sights and smells that percolate as tensions mount to the eventual boil. Atmospheric, chilling and dark, See What I Have Done is an intense read and an excellent debut.
The oddness, and the interest, of See What I Have Done is its ability to inveigle the reader to spend so much time with the Borden family. These characters are, almost without exception, each strange and terrible in their own ways, and their struggles to have lives they can call their own raise for us enduring questions about autonomy and family attachment. Prix et récompensesDistinctions
Fiction.
Literature.
Thriller.
Historical Fiction.
HTML:"One of America's most notorious murder cases inspires this feverish debut" novel that goes inside the mind of Lizzie Borden (The Guardian). On the morning of August 4, 1892, Lizzie Borden calls out to her maid: Someone's killed Father. The brutal ax-murder of Andrew and Abby Borden in their home in Fall River, Massachusetts, leaves little evidence and many unanswered questions. In this riveting debut novel, Sarah Schmidt reimagines the day of the infamous murders as an intimate story of a family devoid of love. While neighbors struggle to understand why anyone would want to harm the respected Bordens, those close to the family have a different tale to tellâ??of a father with an explosive temper, a spiteful stepmother, and two spinster sisters desperate for their independence. As the police search for clues, Lizzie's memories of that morning flash in scattered fragments. Had she been in the barn or the pear arbor to escape the stifling heat of the house? When did she last speak to her stepmother? Were they really gone and would everything be better now? Shifting among the perspectives of the unreliable Lizzie, her older sister Emma, the housemaid Bridget, and the enigmatic stranger Benjamin, the events of that fateful day are slowly revealed through a high-wire feat of storytelli Aucune description trouvée dans une bibliothèque |
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Google Books — Chargement... GenresClassification décimale de Melvil (CDD)823.92Literature English & Old English literatures English fiction Modern Period 2000-Classification de la Bibliothèque du CongrèsÉvaluationMoyenne:
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Borden was cleared in her trial, but one cannot write a novel such as this without putting forward a theory of who did it, and Schmidt gives us her take on it with a convincing use of narrative and character development.
Schmidt imparts the story through four narrative voices. There are the Borden sisters, Emma and Lizzie, and their maid Bridget, all based on people involved in these events. There is also Benjamin, a violent young man driven by resentment of the father that abandoned his family for another woman, who hovers around the family at the crucial time, observing what is going on. Each of these could easily be an unreliable narrator, issuing a self-serving account of events.
The parallels between Benjamin's background and that of Lizzie and Emma are striking and, since his presence is mostly unremarked upon by other characters, it's tempting to think of him as some kind of alter-ego for one of them. I'm not sure that's what Schmidt intended, but it added a bit of additional interest to think of him in that way. ( )