I Capture the Castle

Author: Dodie Smith

Age: YA/Adult (see discussion below)

Believe it or not, the author is best known for writing 101 Dalmations. This is her first novel. I found it in a bookstore several years ago and was intrigued because the recommendation on the cover is from J.K. Rowling. She says, "This book has one of the most charismatic narrators I've ever met." I have to agree. The book starts with what is, I think, my favorite opening sentence in literature: "I write this sitting in the kitchen sink." How could you not be intrigued by that? The story is told in journal form--the journal of Cassandra Mortmain, a seventeen year old girl who lives in a rundown old castle in 1930s England. Cassandra is delightful. She's quite a bit Anne of Green Gables--lots of imagination and love of nature--although perhaps not as good or as cheery as Anne.

Cassandra has one of those endearingly zany families for which I have an enormous soft spot--perhaps because I like to think I come from one myself. She lives with her father, Mortmain, who is a temperamental writer; her stepmother, Topaz, an artist's model who is several years younger than Mortmain and enjoys communing with nature in the nude; her beautiful but unhappy older sister Rose; her younger brother, Thomas; and Stephen, the (breathtakingly handsome) orphaned son of the family's former maid, who is in love with Cassandra and keeps plagiarizing poetry to tell her so.

Cassandra's father, Mortmain, wrote a very successful book over a decade before the story opens. In the early years after the book came out he made a lot of money from it, and the family enjoyed their new wealth. They took a forty year lease on the castle, made repairs, and furnished it beautifully. But Mortmain has not written anything since--no one knows why--and their income has dwindled into nonexistence, as none of them really have any marketable skills. Most of the family's possessions have been sold, and they can scarcely afford to eat. Just when the situation seems really desperate, Rose wishes on an ancient carved head--either an angel or a devil; they can't tell--high on the kitchen wall.

Enter the Cottons: Simon and Neil, two brothers from America. Simon has just inherited Scoatney, the nearby manor house, and is also the Mortmains' new landlord. As Rose is a devoted student of Austen, she immediately decides to solve the family's financial problems by making Simon fall in love with her.

I read this book for the first time when I was in my early teens, and ever since I have listed it as one of my very favorites. I thought that I had re-read it several times since then, but when I read it this past week I realized that I didn't actually remember very much of it, and it must have been many years since my last read. I loved it the first time I read it, but I think I actually appreciated it more this time around. It's not one of those neat and tidy, cliched romantic comedy love stories--and that's what I wanted when I was a teenager. I remember feeling disappointed in that regard. It's much more a story of unrequited love--for many of the characters, for truly evenly requited love is rare. I understand that now (oh how wise I have become in the past decade!) and I love the book that much more for its honesty. Cassandra herself says that she only likes the sorts of books where the characters are so real and messy that they get under your skin and you can't stop thinking about them even after you've finished the book. And that's how this book is. But it's not a bad thing, because the characters are so likable that you won't mind having them dancing around in your brain.

It's also a story about the joys and pitfalls of sisterhood. I like how Smith captures that strange point in life when siblings are beginning to grow up, and the simple connection of being sister or brother, built-in playmate and best friend becomes more tenuous and more complex--that point when a person realizes that their siblings are adults, individuals--and that they may or may not actually be likable as such.

You will recognize Pride and Prejudice as the jumping off point, of course, but the characters and the plot twists are all their own.

Note: They made a movie of this book in 2003, but I've never seen it. If you have and it's not any good, then someone messed up somewhere--don't hold it against this book.

Recommended for readers who like: Jane Austen; the Bronte sisters; Anne of Green Gables; The Wedding Date; Hilary McKay