Galveston Homes and a Book Review (The Woman in White)

As if it wasn't enough to for us to take in, searching out the tree sculptures in Galveston, every corner, every block, was filled with beautiful, stately, homes like these:











Imagine how much work and dedication it must have taken to restore these home after Hurricane Ike!



I just finished reading a book - - a literal TOME of a book, on my nook: The Woman in White, by Wilkie Collins. This massive adventure is 590 pages on the nook, but was actually a very fast read.

This classic, written in 1860, intimidated me when I first picked it up for my Classics book club. Besides being huge, I worried that the language of the 1800s would drown me in some kind of twilight between wakefulness and sleep.

But it was more of a modern-day, page-turner, OMG! What's-going- to- happen -next -kind -of -novel! Wilkie Collins wrote what came to be known as a "sensation" novel, printed in serial installments in newspapers, and eagerly awaited by the non-TV-viewing public. Many of the early reviewers trashed the novel when it first came out, but this book has surfaced again, over and over, in various forms, across the decades, as plays, silent movies, TV miniseries, and movies.

The novel presents a mystery that must be solved, involving star-crossed lovers, evil husbands, fainting women, mice treated like children, dwarfs and ghosts, a peculiar uncle, secret organizations, plots, identity theft, insane asylums and of course, murder!

As long as this book is, it's a satisfying, engrossing read. I stayed up way too long reading this, and stole moments away from the rest of my life to read it here and there, (even while drying my hair at one point.) (not my best hair day, I might add.)

(One caveat; the language of the 1800s became almost infectious, and I foolishly wrote a letter to the IRS emulating the style of the time. If I end up in tax jail, I hope to take a nice stash of Wilkie Collins' books along with me.)