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A review by quoththegirl
The Child from the Sea by Elizabeth Goudge
3.0
I'm unsure how to rate this book since I have such mixed feelings. This is the first book by Goudge that I've read, and I was predisposed to like it because of the Welsh setting (for the first chunk of the book). I found an absolutely gorgeous copy at a used book sale, and I always want to love books that have clearly been cherished. This one has an inscription, "To Betsey, Happy Birthday, Love Kearny" dated 10/5/1978, and Betsey Costner glued a bookplate with her name on it inside the front cover.
The story itself has a lot of charm initially, but it unfolds at an extremely leisurely pace. My copy has 736 pages, and the first 265 pages are purely about Lucy's childhood (and thus are almost entirely fictional since not much is know of Lucy Walter's childhood). The idyllic tenor of the book shifts abruptly halfway through, and the last several hundred pages are just a miserable slide into decline for the protagonist, which was a slog to get through. Goudge does her best to make Lucy a sympathetic character, which requires some gymnastics around the known circumstances of Lucy's life. In order for her not to be morally grey at best, Goudge has to make her rather slow on the uptake; a quicker character wouldn't have been able to avoid realizing what was going on around her. Her love for Charles seems rather pathetic, not to mention unfounded, and the author's attempts to humanize Charles don't really come off. He was a right jerk and no mistake. Goudge wanted to write a Christian story about forgiveness and redemption, and she plays fast and loose with the historical record to do so, having Lucy die of an eminently more respectable case of pernicious anemia instead of dying of a veneral disease, as seems to have been the case in reality. Overall, the book is sweet and touching at times, but it's difficult to connect with the heroine, and the story drags heavily by the end.
The story itself has a lot of charm initially, but it unfolds at an extremely leisurely pace. My copy has 736 pages, and the first 265 pages are purely about Lucy's childhood (and thus are almost entirely fictional since not much is know of Lucy Walter's childhood). The idyllic tenor of the book shifts abruptly halfway through, and the last several hundred pages are just a miserable slide into decline for the protagonist, which was a slog to get through. Goudge does her best to make Lucy a sympathetic character, which requires some gymnastics around the known circumstances of Lucy's life. In order for her not to be morally grey at best, Goudge has to make her rather slow on the uptake; a quicker character wouldn't have been able to avoid realizing what was going on around her. Her love for Charles seems rather pathetic, not to mention unfounded, and the author's attempts to humanize Charles don't really come off. He was a right jerk and no mistake. Goudge wanted to write a Christian story about forgiveness and redemption, and she plays fast and loose with the historical record to do so, having Lucy die of an eminently more respectable case of pernicious anemia instead of dying of a veneral disease, as seems to have been the case in reality. Overall, the book is sweet and touching at times, but it's difficult to connect with the heroine, and the story drags heavily by the end.