If you’re a fan of the Bronte sisters, you need to read this book.

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But really. More than anything I want to go and read all of the Bronte works, something I have truthfully not done, in order to study them as much as Catherine Lowell, the author of this book, clearly had to.

However, in particular, if you are a fan of Jane Eyre, as I am– you, more than anyone, need to read this. It makes your mind run with ideas and possibilities, all the while following Samantha and her professor through this journey.

In this smart and enthralling debut in the spirit of The Weird Sisters and Special Topics in Calamity Physics, the only remaining descendant of the Brontë family embarks on a modern-day literary scavenger hunt to find the family’s long-rumored secret estate, using clues her eccentric father left behind.

Samantha Whipple is used to stirring up speculation wherever she goes. As the last remaining descendant of the Brontë family, she’s rumored to have inherited a vital, mysterious portion of the Brontë’s literary estate; diaries, paintings, letters, and early novel drafts; a hidden fortune that’s never been shown outside of the family.

But Samantha has never seen this rumored estate, and as far as she knows, it doesn’t exist. She has no interest in acknowledging what the rest of the world has come to find so irresistible; namely, the sudden and untimely death of her eccentric father, or the cryptic estate he has bequeathed to her.

But everything changes when Samantha enrolls at Oxford University and bits and pieces of her past start mysteriously arriving at her doorstep, beginning with an old novel annotated in her father’s handwriting. As more and more bizarre clues arrive, Samantha soon realizes that her father has left her an elaborate scavenger hunt using the world’s greatest literature. With the aid of a handsome and elusive Oxford professor, Samantha must plunge into a vast literary mystery and an untold family legacy, one that can only be solved by decoding the clues hidden within the Brontë’s own writing.

A fast-paced adventure from start to finish, this vibrant and original novel is a moving exploration of what it means when the greatest truth is, in fact, fiction.

This book took me a little longer to read than my usual speed. One, because I just had a baby, but two because there was so much academia in it and theories that I had to take the time to process it. Don’t get me wrong, it doesn’t necessarily slow you down– but it makes your mind want to pause and truly think it out.

I loved this book for that. And its characters.

The only downfall, I think, with this book is I had a little trouble connecting with Samantha. It wasn’t that she wasn’t likable or she didn’t have human attributes that made you want to connect, it was that I just had a hard time thinking the way she did as she came across on the page.

Regardless, I wish to get to know the Brontes…and then read this book again. You should, too.