Can anyone say "underwhelming?" Boy, for a book that has been talked about and made into movies so often, this thriller didn't exactly get me on the edge of my seat. First off, I really could have used more back story to the characters. It really wasn't built up enough for me to feel the tragedy of the situation. You really have to love something before you can feel the pain of loss.
Second, I was truly expecting Mr. Hyde to be some diabolical genius who sabotaged the heroic efforts and gentleman like conduct of Dr. Jekyll. Wrong. Mr. Hyde was kind of like a grumpy old man with a cane, who one time beat someone with it and they happened to die.
My guess is that this book possibly would have been better had I not known the premise. There are some books that are still captivating even if you know the general plot before hand, and I was hoping this would be one of them. I guess it wasn't. My recommendation is to go see one of the many movies in a dark room and tell ghost stories afterward. Maybe, just maybe, then someone might get an enjoyable fright.
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A list of what's to come, and what has already been explored.
My Written Artwork Journey Explained here
- Animal Farm - George Orwell
- The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald
- Emma - Jane Austen
- Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
- Cat on a Hot Tin Roof - Tennessee Williams
- Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
- Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde - Robert Louis Stevenson
- Frankenstein - Mary Shelley
- The Canterbury Tales - Geoffrey Chaucer
- Les Miserables - Victor Hugo
- Nineteen Eighty-four - George Orwell
- Death of a Salesman - Arthur Miller
- Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
- The Scarlet Letter - Nathaniel Hawthorne
- The Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
- Treasure Island - Robert Louis Stevenson
- Pickwick Papers - Charles Dickens
- Catch-22 - Joseph Heller
- The Catcher in the Rye - J.D. Salinger
- Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
- Invisible Man - Ralph Ellison
- Lord of the Flies - William Golding
- Slaughterhouse-Five - Kurt Vonnegut
- The Sun Also Rises - Ernest Hemingway
- Their Eyes Were Watching God - Zora Neale Hurston
- Things Fall Apart - Chinua Achebe
- Love in the Time of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
- War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
- Little Woman - Louisa Ma Alcott
- Crime and Punishment - Fedor Dostoyevsky
- Watership Down - Richard Adams
- Doctor Zhivago - Boris Pasternak
- The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn - Mark Twain
- All Quiet on the Western Front - Erich Maria Remarque
- Sherlock Holmes - Arthur Conan Doyle
- Moby Dick - Herman Melville
- The Red Badge of Courage - Stephen Crane
- Robinson Crusoe - Daniel Defoe
- Tales - Edgar Allan Poe
- Diary of a Madman and Other Stories - Nikolai Gogol
- Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
- A Farewell To Arms - Ernest Hemingway
- Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen


























I read this book for one of my English lit classes and I think the background you might have missed is that this epistolary novel, like Dracula, is a commentary on English society at the time. On the surface, the Victorians and Edwardians were proper and moral, but underneath it was one of the raunchiest and immoral times. Thus Mr. Hyde represents that 'perversion' of mankind.
ReplyDeleteHi, Bethany!
ReplyDeleteI was staring at this picture and having fun.. I love it!
Missing you at my blog! :-)
Take care,
Luciane at HomeBunch.com