I’m going to briefly review the novel that my blog is centered around. Please note that this is simply an opinion based review of the novel.

Frankly, I found this book was a drag to read. The language and sentence structure was not something I was too in favor  of. I think it was the way everything was stretched out to be so terribly slow and boring. However, I think Verlyn Klinkenborg succeeded in his purpose; convey the world in the point of view of a tortoise.This concept is why the book caught my attention in the first place. I was very interested to see how this would be pulled off. In English, we would call this purpose “to tell a story” put simply. I believe that another purpose that could have been achieved here was to inform the audience about the life of Gilbert White, by incorporating real historical events and quotes from Mr. White’s journals.

authorspurpose

* a diagram depicting the multiple purposes an author writes. These are not the only purposes, they are just the one most often covered in English class, from vbsschools.com*

Well, I found out, and I didn’t like how this turtle-realism was formulated. Everything was much too slow-going for me unfortunately. I really tried to enjoy the novel for what it was, but I kept finding myself thinking “ugh! Get on with the point already! What is this paragraph even about?”. However, I think anyone could enjoy this book, especially if they enjoy nature. There are plenty of tranquil descriptions of Selborne throughout the novel, and my own impatience kept me from enjoying the book for what it really was. The descriptions of all of the things that Timothy saw could have been very nice by themselves, but I found that some paragraphs did more harm than they did help. Some descriptions that were given were so long and drawn out that it took away from the actual events in the novel, making everything a lot harder to follow. Sometimes you had to skip entire paragraphs just to find out that something as simple as a smile was being exchanged between two human characters.

However, I will agree with Amazon product reviewerthat for some reason, the novel got much easier to read about halfway through. I think maybe it was because the sentence structure changed some so things didn’t seem so drawn out. Another component that I didn’t like about the novel was the fact that Timothy knew so much about the human world. How could Timothy possibly know what Gilbert White wrote in his journals, or said in his sermons? I could see overheard conversations and pondering those as a turtle, but Timothy seemed to be all-knowing of the human world.

Overall the novel is a nice read for someone who can really get lost in descriptive word, I just don’t think it was my speed.

*featured image courtesy of Kendryia Library*