Mrs. Touched does in fact cause the reader to stop and think about how life and its complexity impacts us. Are our feelings the truth? How does their perspective color mine? Am I the fraud?

This is the second acclaimed Zadie Smith book I’ve read. It will be my last. just don’t like her “stream of consciousness” writing style, and she bounces around in time, only occasionally clueing the reader into the timeline. The story is interesting and she is definitely talented, but her writing is not for me.

Smith’s writing is so beautiful. And the dialogue! Some of the middle sections veered too far from the center but it was a minor wobble in an otherwise fantastic book.

The stories of the lives of William Ainsworth, Eliza Touchet, Sir Roger Tichborne and Andrew Bogle all intertwined to give us quite an interesting read and a unique novel…yet overly complex with no sense of real purpose.

This book transports, in time; informs; entertains, and puzzles.

What started as a satire of dreary, bloated Dickensian novels becomes one midway through. Too much shifting of chronology and perspective; the overlong Jamaican section is a tedious digression. A book only fans of Dickens could love.