Fingersmith | 
 enlarge | Author: Sarah Waters
Publisher: Riverhead Trade
Category: Book
List Price: $16.00
Buy New: $10.88
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Rating:  158 reviews
Sales Rank: 67739
Media: Paperback
Edition: 1st
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 582
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.8
Dimensions (in): 7.9 x 5.1 x 1.3
ISBN: 1573229725
Dewey Decimal Number: 823.914
EAN: 9781573229722
ASIN: 1573229725
Publication Date: October 1, 2002
Shipping: Eligible for Super Saver Shipping
Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
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| Editorial Reviews:
Amazon.com Review
Fingersmith is the third slice of engrossing lesbian Victoriana from Sarah Waters. Although lighter and more melodramatic in tone than its predecessor, Affinity, this hypnotic suspense novel is awash with all manner of gloomy Dickensian leitmotifs: pickpockets, orphans, grim prisons, lunatic asylums, "laughing villains," and, of course, "stolen fortunes and girls made out to be mad." Divided into three parts, the tale is narrated by two orphaned girls whose lives are inextricably linked. Waters's penchant for byzantine plotting can get a bit exhausting, but even at its densest moments--and remember, this is smoggy London circa 1862--it remains mesmerizing. A damning critique of Victorian moral and sexual hypocrisy, a gripping melodrama, and a love story to boot, this book ingeniously reworks some truly classic themes. --Travis Elborough, Amazon.co.uk
Product Description
In Victorian England, an orphan girl is sent to a country estate to work for-and ultimately woo-its young heiress, on behalf of a mysterious benefactor known as Gentleman.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 153 more reviews...
 half amazing... half not. November 16, 2008
the first half of this book was so good, i was in shock!
it starts in a slow but very engaging way... turns surprisingly great...
but the second part of the story was too much for me...
i lost interest, i wanted so bad to know what would happen with the main characters, but it just turned too complicated and unengaging...
it all makes sense and it's kind of fascinating, but the emotional grip dissapears and i was a little dissapointed to feel turned down after such a compelling first half.
 A tale of mystery & madness October 8, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
The first section of this book had me hooked. The labyrinthine underworld of Victorian London, the strange and intriguing characters and the nefarious plot set in motion are the books strongest points and they're at their best in the opening chapters. But by the end of the first section the emotional angst was getting to be a bit much, and the pornography-by-proxy in the second section seems like a 21st century cop out; seriously, the author had to resort to that in order to convey the heroine's bleak, oppressive life? The love story between the two heroines and their mutual betrayal ought to have been enough to carry the second heroine's pathos. When we get back to moving the plot forward, with one girl locked up in a madhouse and the other a prisoner in the London underworld the book begins to fascinate again. And that fascination lasts through a startling twist and a dramatic & emotional climax. But again, at the very conclusion of the book, the author throws in the porno stuff, which honestly distracts from the mystery, the romance and the drama of what would otherwise be a thrilling story.
 Heart pounding suspense October 2, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
I LOVED this book. My heart was pounding during several narrative moments in the novel. There are lots of plot twists and turns, and the reader will never see them coming. I lost many hours of sleep reading this book because I just couldn't put it down.
Historical novel September 24, 2008
A female Oliver Twist story with a Lesbian sub plot. This is an interesting fictional account of a female orphan reared by thieves (fingersmiths) . It takes place in 1844 in London and is sexually explicit in a way a Dickens novel could never be. Well researched and wonderfully written.
 Thumbs Down September 5, 2008
3 out of 7 found this review helpful
I don't like writing negative reviews. Really, I don't. ----Except, that is, for books such as this one which fully deserve it. Fingersmith is, to be brief, a sump of slipshod writing, contrived plotting, bogus atmospherics and two dimensional characters. If we are at the point where this can be considered as anything approaching Dickens or The Brontes, as so many of the professional reviewers do on the back cover and the opening pages, then we have reached a low point indeed in literary valuation. ----As a test, pick any page from Charlotte Bronte's masterwork, Villette, concerning its heroine Lucy Snow, and compare it to any of the pages here concerning Maud or Sue, and you shall behold the clear difference. You may still prefer Maud and Sue and Fingersmith, but that is rather a judgment on you than on Bronte. My guess, though, is that most reviewers here haven't even read Bronte unless they were forced to do so by an English teacher.
Outraged readers will no doubt want to know what I mean by slipshod writing since they, to my disbelief, refer to it as "wonderful," "beautiful," "skillful" and other such superlatives. Let's take Sue's character, shall we? The girl was brought up in an environment wherein she didn't even learn to write her own name, and yet, she mouths utterances such as, "I was, not to put too fine a point on it, properly funked." P.423 This is, not to put too fine a point on it, the voice of an educated person like Sarah Waters with a slangy flair to it, not Sue, or Susan, or whatever name you want to call her by the end. Sue also mentions Helen of Troy as if she has read The Iliad and many other incongruous things besides that beggar belief.
My real problem with the book though is that it is so unchallenging as well as unentertaining. To plough through this book is to be exposed, time and again, to man's inhumanity to man, man's inhumanity to woman, woman's inhumanity to woman - especially in the madhouse, and so on. My only feeling after finishing it was a relief at not having to read any more about comic book characters about whom I couldn't care two shillings put through a Victorian meat grinder, which is no less brutal than the Twenty-First Century version of it.
My final exhortation to the prospective reader: Read the Brontes, read Dickens (particularly Bleak House), read George Eliot, read Thomas Hardy (esp. Jude the Obscure), read, in short, the real thing rather than this, sadly, uninspired and uninspiring literary throwback that, as Sarah Waters has said, arose out of her doctoral studies on Victorian pornography.
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