Have you read it? I think I expected it to be more adventurous.įor more reviews, visit my blog: Book Chatter. We picked it for book club and there wasn’t that much to discuss but some of the members have seen the series adaptation and so had some good comparisons to share.

Does the creature represent something or more specifically, someone in the story? I found this story to be very readable and read it in one afternoon but I found the characters to be unremarkable. After years of rumors, a man shows up dead and once again the town is convinced that the serpent is back to its tricks.Īs you’re reading though, whether or not this creature actually exists is left up to the reader. What makes this story interesting is that it also includes a mythical creature, the Essex serpent. Seeking refuge in fresh air and open space, she leaves the metropolis for coastal Essex, accompanied by her inquisitive and obsessive eleven-year-old son, Francis, and the boy’s nanny, Martha, her fiercely protective friend. When Cora Seaborne’s brilliant, domineering husband dies, she steps into her new life as a widow with as much relief as sadness: her marriage was an unhappy one, and she never suited the role of society wife. Not exactly what I expected but entertaining nonetheless. Told with exquisite grace and intelligence, this novel is most of all a celebration of love, and the many different guises it can take. Although they can agree on absolutely nothing, as the seasons turn around them in this quiet corner of England, they find themselves inexorably drawn together and torn apart. But Will sees his parishioners' agitation as a moral panic, a deviation from true faith. Cora, a keen amateur naturalist is enthralled, convinced the beast may be a real undiscovered species. They meet as their village is engulfed by rumours that the mythical Essex Serpent, once said to roam the marshes claiming human lives, has returned. Cora is a well-to-do London widow who moves to the Essex parish of Aldwinter, and Will is the local vicar.

Set in Victorian London and an Essex village in the 1890's, and enlivened by the debates on scientific and medical discovery which defined the era, The Essex Serpent has at its heart the story of two extraordinary people who fall for each other, but not in the usual way.

Novel the essex serpent