Customer Reviews

The Belton Estate

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This novel of Trollope's poses his usual question: will the middle class heroine find true love in spite of various social/emotional conflicts? In this case his poverty-stricken heroine has two suiters and must decide between the one she loves and the one who loves her. The dilemma is a tricky one since the man she loves has culture and wealth and breeding but no strong feelings for her; while the rougher and uncultured man who loves her is truly devoted to her. Trollope has written better paced novels but this one does hold the reader until the solution is reached.

A wonderful story that hooks you right out of the box...with all the usual "you are there" Trollopian visual descriptions. I think that Trollope was one of the world's great novelists and he does not disappoint here. But the publisher! As noted by other reviewers, misspellings, malapropisms and atrocious punctuation abound and really ticked me off considering the price of this book! There is totally no excuse for this slovenly editing. I think it was done by a computer program...another victim of outsourcing. Another thing is that although the listing is for Dodo press, the copy I received from Amazon was from BiblioBazaar!? So the listed publisher is probably not at fault.

I'm halfway through this book, and I'm really enjoying it. HOWEVER, the edition I received seems to have been copyedited by preschoolers. Most of the commas are missing, which makes it a challenge to decipher Trollope's often long, meandering sentences. And the text is littered with misspellings. Fortunately, it only took a few chapters for me to get in the rhythm of this comma-deprived edition, and I do like the story. I'd recommend this book only if you're a real Trollope devotee.

This Trollope novel has been one of my favorites for years, the character of Will Belton is wonderful, and the episodes between Clara and her fiance Frederick's family are priceless. There is so much to like about this story, it would be a shame for a reader to pass it up.

A very satisfactory Trollope novel. His skill at creating characters rarely disappoints. It appears that this edition was taken directly from the Gutenberg online book. There are many typos, punctuation errors repeats of words that become annoying after a few chapters. When reading wonderful Trollope dialogue, the reader does not want to stumble because a word is repeated two to three times in a row or fly through a sentence with no commas where needed.

The novel is as engaging as I expected, given my love of Trollope's other works, but this version is really terrible- I agree with the other review that the punctuation editting was incredibly distracting. At first, I thought it was an annoying stylistic affectation that most commas, dashes and colons were missing. When I was reading the first chapter, it felt, at times, as though James Joyce had stepped into Trollope's world. Then I saw several odd periods in the midst of sentences and concluded the problem was likely a crappy typesetter and inadequate quality control of the proof. I've never seen this imprint before, but I'll be avoiding it in the future.

Will Belton is one of the best characters ever created by any author I've read! I just loved reading every word about him. The heroine, Clara, is likable, and I enjoyed her, and the ones you love to hate were here as well. But Will Belton was the crown jewel of this story. It was so much fun, and so satisfying, to read about him, and it felt good to love him so much and to be rooting for him. The book moved fast and had no slow parts for me. I'm looking forward to rereading it later when my memory of it dims a bit, because it was just so much fun to read. I gave a great sigh of contentment at the end.