historical fiction
In Oxford, England around the turn of the 20th
century, Esme’s father is part of a team writing a new dictionary. During her
childhood, her widower father allows Esme to spend much of her time with him at
his workplace where the dictionary words, definitions, and usages are written
on slips of paper and stored in small cubbyholes. Esme dreams to work on the
dictionary too. She has been collecting
and hiding some of the slips of paper that have gotten lost or left behind
since childhood and, as an adult, realizes that there are many words and
definitions that are specific to women’s points of view which are not being
captured by the men writing the dictionary. She purposefully expands her
collection of words which she calls The Dictionary of Lost Words. Meanwhile, her life continues as life does with unexpected
relationships, influences, and experiences.
I had never stopped to think of the process by which the
first dictionaries were written—the research and word collection processes were
larger than I’d realized and involved teams of people. The dictionary written
about in this novel, the Oxford English Dictionary, took seven decades to
complete. This aspect of the story was fascinating at the beginning. And Esme,
herself, was an alluring character given her intelligence, background, and
future possibilities. I also found many of the other characters worthy of
admiration.
However, this was a slow-paced novel overall. Sections were, sadly, boring. The romances and “bad guys” that Esme encountered were
so chaste, mild, and anticlimactic that I’m not sure why Pip Williams even
bothered including them in the story. I mean, Esme’s experiences seemed very
authentic and common for most people, but not necessarily worthy of being
written about in a novel. Even though
her mother died when she was young, Esme had a very loving father and godmother
and, overall, had everything she needed. I, therefore, found myself wondering
what the hype was all about with this novel. Yes, Esme had a few bad
experiences, but nothing out of the ordinary. Aside from the dictionary aspect,
it was a mundane story.
The narrator of the audiobook, Pippa Bennett-Warner, did a
terrific job. She had a variety of
voices and accents and was a great voice actor. However, she did not pause between
section breaks in the novel, frequently leaving me stuck in the prior scene and
having to mentally catch up. Therefore, I’ll give
her an A-.
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