The Children's Book by A.S. Byatt5/18/2023 ![]() ![]() The book opens in the South Kensington Museum, where famed children’s book author Olive Wellwood is visiting the museum’s Keeper of Precious Metals, Major Prosper Cain. Encompassing such diverse interests as pottery, decorative arts, women’s rights, bank fraud, the demise of Victorian England, German puppetry, fairytales, and war, The Children’s Book sets itself amidst the Wellwood family and their acquaintances, running from 1895 through the end of World War I. And start with The Children’s Book, a behemoth with paper pages and an exquisite cover based on a Lalique jewelry design.ĭespite Byatt’s often formidable erudition, The Children’s Book is far more accessible than Posession or the Babel Tower trilogy. Turn everything off except your reading light and try to start reading again, before you lose the ability to concentrate on anything longer than than a byte. For those up to the task in this world of twittering, tweeting texts, the rewards are many.įor those no longer able to sit themselves down with a good book, and I mean a book, dammit, not some computerized booklike object or a fancy telephone the size of a card deck, well, friend, the loss is yours. At 675 pages, The Children’s Book demands a rare thing from today’s readers: an undivided, well-cultivated attention span. ![]()
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