386. The Maze at Windermere

Rating:  ☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:   Terra McKinnish

Author:   Gregory Blake Smith

Genre:   Fiction, Historical Fiction

580 pages, published July 11, 2018

Reading Format:  Book

Summary

Like its title, The Maze at Windermere takes the reader on a maze like journey through multiple time periods in the same area of Newport, Rhode Island.  We follow the romantic entanglements of couples through the ages, starting in the present day and going back to the 1600’s.

Quotes 

“What interests me,” she took up finally, and there was now no touch of her characteristic satire, “is a life in which I am engaged in discovering what interests me. Not just now, as a young woman, but when I am a wife, and when I have children, and beyond. A life of imagination, and experience, and engagement, and commitment to something beyond myself.”

 

“But I feel myself marooned on the island of myself.”

 

“One must take care that one’s life does not begin to resemble the plot of a novel.”

 

“Ah, to be able to read both the surface and that which is below the surface!”

 

My Take

While it started out a bit slowly, around the halfway point I started to really enjoy The Maze at Windermere.  Smith is a talented writer and presents some compelling insights into the human condition and the motivations which drive us.  Interestingly, I found myself most captivated by the oldest story from the 1600’s and the most recent one from 2011.