Reading List by Jennie for April through June

Lorna Doone by R.D. Blackmore

I went into this knowing nothing about it but the name. It ended up being a bit of a slog, for a few reasons: dialogue rendered in impenetrable dialect, a lot of blah blah blah musings, and the fact that I didn’t really like the narrator.

John Ridd is an adolescent when his father, a local farmer, is murdered by the Doone clan, outlaws who were once aristocrats. The Doones live in an isolated valley in Exmoor, and in spite of the fact that they rob and kidnap with i...