Have I read this before: Nope!

Review: This was an…interesting book. It’s another “let’s bash Victorian-era hypocrisy,” which is a major theme of like 60% of the books on my list (obviously a biased list, haha), so it’s gotten pretty old. But I felt like Butler’s writing style was engaging and I like how the narrator wasn’t one of the Pontifex family members but a godfather of the main character Ernest. I seem to enjoy books where the narrator is not actually the main character for some reason. Also, it was apparently semi-autobiographical, which I can see in how Butler explores certain nuances of the relationship between fathers and sons.

Favorite Part: This scathing description of Badcock:

“Not only was he ugly, dirty, ill-dressed, bumptious, and in every way objectionable, but he was deformed and waddled when he walked so that he had won a nickname which I can only reproduce by calling it “Here’s my back, and there’s my back,” because the lower parts of his back emphasized themselves demonstratively as though about to fly off in different directions like the two extreme notes in the chord of the augmented sixth, with every step he took.”

Rating: 5/10