The House of the Seven Gables (from Ex Libris)

7/3-7/7/05—House of the Seven Gables by Nathaniel Hawthorne
This read really slowed down my pace that I had going. I won’t say that it was a bad read, just bogged down. Hawthorne here depicts his penchant to force a moral on the state of mankind or life itself into nearly every single description. In the author’s prologue, he says that it’s a romance, but I found that it was much more his own romantic notion towards the house’s history, that he’d created in his own mind. Because of the comments by the author, I figured that the two younger characters would eventually “hook up,” but there was little development for the reader’s sake of their budding relationship. Near the end of the story, the young man shows up long enough to profess his love as well as his secret identity to wrap everything up nicely—a little too nicely for me, but then again, I know that this is how things were expected to be written at the time.