Book #78: The Children's Book

Title: The Children's Book
Author: A.S. Byatt

I loved A.S. Byatt's Possession (and I even liked the movie, unlike most of the world), so I was thrilled to hear that A.S. Byatt was coming out with a new book. The Children's Book is dense and epic, and like Possession, includes stories within stories (Olive Wellwood, the story's matriarch, is an author of children's books), which is part of what I found most charming about Possession. The Children's Book is essentially the story of the Wellwoods and a half-dozen other families, bound together by their Fabian sympathies and artistic inclinations, who live in the South of England. It takes place over a period of about 30 years, culminating at the end of WWI. I loved the first several hundred pages (it's 700+ pages), when the Wellwood children were small, but as they grew, I started to dread reading about their lives and the lives of their friends.While Possession is charming, though long, The Children's Book is too sprawling, with too many characters to care intensely about their tortured lives. I felt like Byatt felt somewhat the same way, since the death of two characters early in the novel took up many chapters, but a half-dozen others were bumped off in the space of a couple of pages later on. It's a beautiful book and a rich book, but eventually not engrossing enough to make me want to read all 700 pages.