Cherise Wolas's Reviews > After Julius

I'm a Howard fan, devoured The Cazelet Chronicles, along with other of her standalone novels. After Julius shows her hallmark writing, the intense inner lives of her characters, here Esme, a widow, her two grown daughters, Cressy, 37, and Emma, 27, along with Dr. Felix King, and a working class wayward poet, Dan Brick. Set essentially over a weekend, there's a peeling away of the surfaces of these characters, the ills they've suffered, how events in their lives have molded and affected them, along with a push-pull about doing good for humanity versus focusing on getting what one wants in one's own life. It's a novel that becomes stranger with the passing pages. Whether the ways in which Emma and Cressy find love - forced or carefully led - is a sign of the times in which the novel was written, or speak to events in Howard's own life - wasn't clear to me, and intensified the strangeness of the novel.