Jaclyn’s Review: The Madwoman Upstairs by Catherine Lowell

The Madwoman Upstairs
written by Catherine Lowell
published by Touchstone, 2016

find it here: (affiliate links) Barnes & Noble, Amazon, iBooks, Target, Walmart, Book Depository, Goodreads

Disclosure: I received a complimentary copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

Did I enjoy it? Oh my goodness, I love this book! Let’s ignore the plot for a minute–this book is just written WELL. I enjoyed reading it. It’s clear the author is intelligent and highly educated. Sentences, paragraphs, and chapters were well thought out. I’ve read books where it sounds like the author just figured out how to use the thesaurus function in the word processor–big words that don’t make a whole lot of sense with the book. This isn’t the case here.

Now let’s talk about the plot. This is painful to admit, but I’ve never read a single Brontë book. Not one. I was a little hesitant to read a book about the Brontës. Would I need to understand the books to understand this one? Nope! You get sucked into these characters and the plot pretty quickly. Throughout the entire book you are left to wonder what on earth Samantha’s inheritance might be. The plot starts to slow down in the middle of the book, but it picked back up and raced until the end. The ending tied in perfectly with the beginning. I’m not sure there has ever been a more well thought-out book. Perhaps one by the Brontës? 😉

 

Would I recommend it? Absolutely! I love this book! I didn’t think that there was any part of the plot that was questionable for a specific age group. However, the writing is quite advanced. I have already recommended this book to others and will continue to do so. Read this book!

 

About the book – from Goodreads: In this smart and enthralling debut in the spirit of The Weird Sisters and Special Topics in Calamity Physics, the only remaining descendant of the Brontë family embarks on a modern-day literary scavenger hunt to find the family’s long-rumored secret estate, using clues her eccentric father left behind.

Samantha Whipple is used to stirring up speculation wherever she goes. As the last remaining descendant of the Brontë family, she’s rumored to have inherited a vital, mysterious portion of the Brontë’s literary estate; diaries, paintings, letters, and early novel drafts; a hidden fortune that’s never been shown outside of the family.

But Samantha has never seen this rumored estate, and as far as she knows, it doesn’t exist. She has no interest in acknowledging what the rest of the world has come to find so irresistible; namely, the sudden and untimely death of her eccentric father, or the cryptic estate he has bequeathed to her.

But everything changes when Samantha enrolls at Oxford University and bits and pieces of her past start mysteriously arriving at her doorstep, beginning with an old novel annotated in her father’s handwriting. As more and more bizarre clues arrive, Samantha soon realizes that her father has left her an elaborate scavenger hunt using the world’s greatest literature. With the aid of a handsome and elusive Oxford professor, Samantha must plunge into a vast literary mystery and an untold family legacy, one that can only be solved by decoding the clues hidden within the Brontë’s own writing.

A fast-paced adventure from start to finish, this vibrant and original novel is a moving exploration of what it means when the greatest truth is, in fact, fiction.