Book Review: Madonna in a Fur Coat

As the paucity of book reviews here would suggest, I've been in a reading slump recently. As an avid reader, I always find it troubling when I go for weeks without finishing a proper novel. Madonna in a Fur Coat was exactly what I needed to break my losing streak.

I'm a member of an informal Internet book club that's going on two years old. It's done a really good job of balancing light fiction, classics, and nonfiction, so I have to say that our two founders (who started the club and who pick most of the books, though with input from everyone else) have excellent taste! Other books I've read (and enjoyed!) for this book club include  The Road to Mecca, Passing, and The Price of Salt.

I am a sucker for character-driven stories that feature moody, introspective protagonists. I guess that even as an adult, I'm an angsty teenager at heart. That's not to suggest that there's anything callow or self-indulgent about Madonna in a Furcoat. Even if it leans heavily on romance tropes that might strike some readers as overdone or tedious, what makes Madonna in a Furcoat stand out isn't the love story but the writing and the characters. It would have been a welcome palate cleanser after The French Lieutenant's Woman, a novel with a similar plot but altogether different style and attitude towards its characters, particularly its love interest. I'll leave off with a favorite quote:

Just as warm sunlight can, by passing through a lens, turn to fire, so too can love. It's wrong to see it as something that swoops in from the outside. It's because it arises from the feelings we carry inside us that it strikes with such violence, at the moment we least expect.