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  Аноним26 октября 2019 г.

  Do you think it is worthwhile to give an author a second chance if the first encounter was less than awesome? Diane Setterfield’s “Once Upon a River” proves that it certainly is.
  It’s been five years since I read “The Thirteenth Tale”, and then I argued in my review that the book was trying a bit too hard to be satisfying and turned out annoyingly eager to please the reader. Well, "Once Upon a River" absolutely IS satisfying. First of all, the book measures perfectly up to its own title (the Russian version is even more elegant, perhaps). What you get is a river of a narrative, ever flowing and never rushing, merging together a number of little stories like tributaries to the big stream of unobtrusive significance. Offering a proper page-turner, Setterfield knows exactly when to reveal another bit of this or that story arc, and this is also something she has fixed since her debut novel. Ultimately, the subject is the same (her trademark, I presume) – fiction and reality intertwined and cross-coupling, as well as references to literary classics. Those are made here rather subtly, but you may think of Alice in Wonderland more than once, reading about one strange little girl and babies turning into piglets and the river Thames where it all began. As I actually dealt with the audiobook, it should be mentioned that Juliet Stephenson, as always, did a great job.

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