Review: Sylvia's Lovers by Elizabeth Gaskell

This book is written by Elizabeth Gaskell who also wrote “North and South” which I love. I have to admit I watched the mini series with Richard Armitage before I read the book and that is probably part of the reason why I love that book so much. As with “Sylvia’s Lovers” it is very much a slow burn and I don’t usually go for that, but the ending always picks up for me in her books. 

Anyway, “Sylvia’s Lovers” is about a young girl named Sylvia. She lives with her parents on a seaside farm in England in the late 18th century. Her cousin Philip falls in love with her, but Sylvia wants nothing to do with him and finds him annoying and almost repugnant. Then one day a sailor comes into town. He is brave and handsome and Sylvia falls head over heels in love with him. He returns the favor and they are to be married. But certain events stand in their way and we follow these characters as they struggle to overcome these obstacles. 

The dialogue is written in dialect, which made it a little hard to keep a good flow when reading, but once you got used to it it wasn’t too bad. I’m never really  fan of dialect in books, because it just seems awkward to me when I am reading it to myself and have no idea how it’s actually supposed to sound. 

As I said this is a slow burn, but that allows for character development, and I did enjoy seeing these characters development from slightly immature young people into adults (although still quite young) marked by their experiences. I do often find with this type of older book that a lot of the character development does happen in the last few chapters, when things come to a head in terms of the plot. I usually find these kinds of book a little long, because I don’t really enjoy them until these last few chapters, when everything finally happens. The endings, however, are usually really emotional and almost always worth the slog of reading the first many pages. 

Gaskell does talk a lot about God in this book, and how the consideration of God and sin has an impact on the characters and their decisions, and that did get a little tiring, just because I’m not a big fan of religion in general.