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Thursday, 8 August 2019

Fabulous Monsters by Alberto Manguel

I received an ARC of this book thanks to Net Galley and publisher Yale University Press in exchange for an honest review.

This is an interesting little collection of discussions about literary characters, for want of a better description. The title 'Fabulous Monsters' is meant to represent all of them but I find it a little confusing on the whole given that many of them are heroic characters. Each discussion is accompanied by a doodle of the character and I really liked these. They added a layer of charm and really helped linked the discussions together. The content of the discussions were sometimes interesting but there seemed very little link in terms of what Manguel chose to discuss about each character. I guess there doesn't need to be but for some of them, the character themselves was barely mentioned. This was particularly baffling with Alice in Wonderland for example, whose discussion was a lengthy comment on Wonderland rather than anything to do with Alice herself, who is actually a pretty interesting character given her origins. I did enjoy this and found it very charming but a few of the literary references were lost on me. A great gift for a fan of literature though.

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