Ria's Reviews > Χείλη σαν βελούδο

''I had come to Quilter Street to be ordinary; now I was more of a torn than ever.''



I don't know if I wanna rate this 4 or 5 stars because the start was so fucking slow and a bit boring but FUCK after like chapter 3-4 I couldn't put it down. I spent all day reading this and now I have a headache.
People say it reminds them of Charles Dickens. Dickens doesn't interest me, meaning I haven’t read his work, so I can't comment on that.

''You smell.......Not at all like a herring, But perhaps, maybe, like a mermaid."
I thought that it was gonna be cringy and bad because of shit like this but I was wrong.

It’s smutty and I somehow didn't mind all the fucking.

I can't say if it was historically accurate or not so here is what Sarah said: ‘’ Tipping the Velvet was never intended to be a work of historical realism. Instead, it offers a 1990s-flavoured lesbian Victorian London, complete with its own clubs, pubs and fashions. It conjures up an antique lesbian lingo, using, or cheerfully misusing, some of the words and phrases – “toms”, “mashers”, “tipping the velvet” itself – that I’d come across in dictionaries of historical slang and in 19th-century pornography. And it makes frequent little nods to lesbian and gay icons and classic queer texts – to Dorian Gray, Hadrian and Antinous, Woolf’s Orlando, Zola’s Nana, Compton Mackenzie’s Extraordinary Women, Henry James’s The Bostonians ... The very patchiness of lesbian history, I was trying to say, invites or incites the lesbian historical novelist to pinch, to appropriate, to make stuff up. I wanted the novel not just to reflect that, but to reflect on it, to lay bare and revel in its own artificiality.’’

I don’t really like historical fiction or reading about the Victorian era because most of the time it’s boring but I really wanted to read Sarah Waters and I finally found one of her books on sale… I’m glad I read it because I loved it. I don’t wanna say much because I think that going into this without knowing much about it is a great choice.

''It is always fun before they catch you.''



I need to watch the TV show.