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cimorene1558's review against another edition
5.0
Charming book. The eye of love turns two plain, unglamorous people into a king and queen in each other's eyes, and plain, unglamorous objects into beautiful drawings in the eyes of a talented child. Happy ending: the good people get happiness, and the mildly bad people get the brush off. Not Margery Sharp's best book, but lovely, and unmistakably her work.
ashleylm's review against another edition
5.0
Where has she been all my life? This is the sort of thing I want to read, not Faulkner, not Hemingway, not Woolf. As far as I'm concerned, 20th Century Fiction (and the appreciation/criticism/history thereof) took a weird turn, and the wrong people, and only a couple of types of writing, became worthy of laurels. But I'd rather read a 1,000 Margery Sharps than one Hemingway. I can only assume it's because she (and Barbara Pym, those sorts of writers) tend to write about people doing things that people might do, and Woolf somehow was deemed worthy because she used stream-of-consciousness, and it was trendy at the time, though it's never appealed to me.
I'm just so glad that certain publishers (e.g. Viriago, Persephone, etc.) have realized some of us will want to read these, very, very much.
None of the characters are particularly likeable, save for Mr. Joyce, and yet she easily manages to let you identify with and root for most of them. The plot is very different from whatever one might think of as a typical domestic novel—I don't think it gives too much away (less than the jacket description!) to say it involves an unwanted orphaned girl, living with an aunt who has been evidently living in sin (gasp!) for several years, who loses her great love, and the book fairly equally follows her and her and him as they cope with and without each other.
Absolutely splendid.
(5* = amazing, terrific book, one of my all-time favourites, 4* = very good book, 3* = good book, but nothing to particularly rave about, 2* = disappointing book, and 1* = awful, just awful. As a statistician I know most books are 3s, but I am biased in my selection and end up mostly with 4s, thank goodness.)
I'm just so glad that certain publishers (e.g. Viriago, Persephone, etc.) have realized some of us will want to read these, very, very much.
None of the characters are particularly likeable, save for Mr. Joyce, and yet she easily manages to let you identify with and root for most of them. The plot is very different from whatever one might think of as a typical domestic novel—I don't think it gives too much away (less than the jacket description!) to say it involves an unwanted orphaned girl, living with an aunt who has been evidently living in sin (gasp!) for several years, who loses her great love, and the book fairly equally follows her and her and him as they cope with and without each other.
Absolutely splendid.
(5* = amazing, terrific book, one of my all-time favourites, 4* = very good book, 3* = good book, but nothing to particularly rave about, 2* = disappointing book, and 1* = awful, just awful. As a statistician I know most books are 3s, but I am biased in my selection and end up mostly with 4s, thank goodness.)
beasley's review
3.0
I recommend reading this and the other two books featuring these characters in order: 1) The Eye of Love, 2) Martha in Paris, and 3) Martha, Eric, and George. These books show Sharp 's genius for writing comedic novels with very flat characters. The second and third books in the trio have feminist sentiments about working women and childcare that were way, way ahead of their time.
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