This is a lovely, lovely book, and it has every ounce of the charm for which it gets praised, but what struck me is the acute sadness that seems to underlie it all. I wonder if I would give it such weight if I'd read it when younger, since a lot of it is quite comic, but it seems to me there's quite a serious grown-up novel quite close to the surface of the charming, amusing romance, and its dogged and wholly admirable refusal to tie things up neatly is merely the most obvious sign. The death of Cassandra's mother, the monstrous egotism and violent temper of her father, for which she never once properly upbraids him even in the privacy of her own thoughts - but locking him in the tower is a kind of justice and the long overdue kick in the pants, so she and Thomas punish him without poisoning themselves with a trace of bitterness, and in a sense, that's what keeps the book so charming and Cassandra so innocent, in spite of everything: the complete absence of bitterness - not to mention the tangled Jacob's ladder of love that causes so much pain. Cassandra's voice at first is so sweet and innocent, but that gets undercut quite early on when she overhears herself being described as 'consciously naive' and thereafter her voice becomes considerably less arch. She is, after all, a child becoming a woman and at the end is left in an adult's dilemma, and as teenagers may not realise, but hopefully most adults are aware, many of those never get truly resolved.