I Capture the Castle - Rambling Readers

English language

ISBN:: 978-1-86049-102-3

(1 review)

I Capture the Castle is the first novel of English author Dodie Smith, written during the Second World War when she and her husband Alec Beesley, an English conscientious objector, moved to California. She longed for home and wrote of a happier time, unspecified in the novel apart from a reference to living in the 1930s. Smith was already an established playwright and later became famous for writing the children's classic The Hundred and One Dalmatians. The novel relates the adventures of an eccentric family, the Mortmains, struggling to live in genteel poverty in a decaying castle during the 1930s. The first-person narrator is Cassandra Mortmain, an intelligent teenager who tells the story through her journal. It is a coming-of-age story in which Cassandra passes from being a girl at the beginning to being a young woman at the end. In 2003 the novel was listed at number 82 in …

I Capture the Castle is the first novel of English author Dodie Smith, written during the Second World War when she and her husband Alec Beesley, an English conscientious objector, moved to California. She longed for home and wrote of a happier time, unspecified in the novel apart from a reference to living in the 1930s. Smith was already an established playwright and later became famous for writing the children's classic The Hundred and One Dalmatians. The novel relates the adventures of an eccentric family, the Mortmains, struggling to live in genteel poverty in a decaying castle during the 1930s. The first-person narrator is Cassandra Mortmain, an intelligent teenager who tells the story through her journal. It is a coming-of-age story in which Cassandra passes from being a girl at the beginning to being a young woman at the end. In 2003 the novel was listed at number 82 in the BBC's survey The Big Read.

3 editions

Paul Oldham reviewed I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith

The best book I've read this year

5 stars

It's perhaps appropriate that it's taken until book 51 of 52 to reach the book which will really stay with me. I went to bed last night with the ending buzzing around in my head.

This is a coming of age tale written in the first person by a young girl in a somewhat unlikely setting before the second world war. The style really gets you into Cassandra's head as she's very honest as to her feelings ... even if she sometimes hides them from herself.

It's also notable for the things she's missing but you are not. I won't give away the plot but there are undercurrents in the relationships between the other characters that she simply doesn't see or comprehend.

Anyway recommended, for all sorts of reasons.