{"id":256,"date":"2009-04-27T10:35:06","date_gmt":"2009-04-27T17:35:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.sparkledesign.net\/fidget\/2009\/04\/27\/strange-and-norrell\/"},"modified":"2009-05-01T10:48:42","modified_gmt":"2009-05-01T17:48:42","slug":"strange-and-norrell","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.sparkledesign.net\/fidget\/2009\/04\/27\/strange-and-norrell\/","title":{"rendered":"Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>By Susanna Clarke<\/p>\n<p>A little bit like &#8220;Harry Potter&#8221; meets &#8220;Jeeves and Wooster.&#8221; Lots of cleverness in this book, wrapped up into a pretty good story. An eccentric little man, who embodies the contradictory forces of solitary research and restoring the glory of Magic to England, meets a mysterious young man, who finds his life&#8217;s calling as magician-explorer. They become each other&#8217;s teacher, cric, enemy, soul-colleague.<\/p>\n<p>One of the intriguing and amusing elements of the book is the fictional &#8220;History of English Magic;&#8221; Clarke supplies the reader with copious footnotes about the important names and anecdotes in this field of supposed historic scholarship.<\/p>\n<p>In spite of all the esoteric details, there is a lot of mystery carried through the entire book. I think I got a little frustrated with how the various storylines did not intersect until the very end of the book. Some characters knew things that other characters needed to know&#8230; and then all of a sudden we&#8217;re told that they found something out but not how they discovered it.<\/p>\n<p>I feel there is a major flaw in the wrap-up: multiple characters had been under an enchantment by the villain, and when he dies those enchantments are all lifted except the one affecting the two main characters. It didn&#8217;t make sense, I wish Clarke had just mentioned why this enchantment was different from the rest rather than making me speculate after I&#8217;d finished the last page.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>By Susanna Clarke A little bit like &#8220;Harry Potter&#8221; meets &#8220;Jeeves and Wooster.&#8221; Lots of cleverness in this book, wrapped <span class=\"more-text\">&hellip;<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[2],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sparkledesign.net\/fidget\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/256"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sparkledesign.net\/fidget\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sparkledesign.net\/fidget\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sparkledesign.net\/fidget\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sparkledesign.net\/fidget\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=256"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.sparkledesign.net\/fidget\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/256\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sparkledesign.net\/fidget\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=256"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sparkledesign.net\/fidget\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=256"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sparkledesign.net\/fidget\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=256"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}