" Just the kind of title that made me squirm as a schoolboy long ago. When such a torment is sprung upon too-young lads, every instinct is to avoid such troublesome contagion at all costs. Marks, questions, exams, unending bother and best avoided.
Then one evening in a bookstore in a land far away I opened up this very book and my eyes glided along the lines like river water over smooth rocks.
Thomas Hardy found the perfect balance in his language: the pace at which the mind precisely captures and renders in imagination the written or spoken word. You’ll never hit the fast-forward button on a Hardy book, and these excellent narrators ensure that you never lose your place — because they never lose theirs, and they care. So we all care a little more, I think, by reading Thomas Hardy. And, needless to say, you can't go wrong with John Lee. "
— Mousepensky, 6/21/2020