July Novel: A Room with a View

I know I’ve been neglecting this blog a little lately – okay, more than a little, it’s been over two months since I last posted, which is not at all like me. I’ve been really busy, I promise! Since I last updated with my review of The Help, I was hired full-time at my office (yay!) and finally made the move to Columbus (double yay!!). Unfortunately I totally missed finishing a book in the month of July. At one point I thought I would be able to make it in the last few days of the month, only to realize that I had got September’s book instead. Sigh.

So now that I’m in my own place, and have a lot more free time on my hands, I was able to get and read July’s book, A Room with a View by E. M. Forester. The novel is about a young woman and her chaperone traveling in Italy sometime before the First World War, with a major theme being the societal roles of women at the turn of the last century. The young female lead, Lucy, is quite an independent young woman, especially for her time period. She wants to learn and have adventures but all of those things are considered “unladylike” and instead she is expected to do a little traveling, meet a nice young man, settle down and get married. While she is in Italy with her older cousin Charlotte they stay at a pension (a term I learned while reading The World According to Garp) and meet the eccentric novelist Eleanor, two kind elderly sisters traveling the world, a kindhearted and funny but socially improper gentleman, and his young son, George, who, if he lived today, would be exactly like Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s character in (500) Days of Summer: a sad, creative hipster hoping to meet a Manic Pixie Dream Girl.

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