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Book Review of The Painted Veil (Vintage International)

The Painted Veil (Vintage International)
sevenspiders avatar reviewed on + 73 more book reviews
Helpful Score: 3


This is one of the few cases where I enjoyed the film better than the book. The book was excellently written, but the main character, Kitty, doesn't learn and grow as much as a person in the book as she does in the movie. Right up until the very final pages she continues to make the same mistakes and behave in the same immature, shallow way that she always did, just as though she learned nothing from the traumas and hardships of living in a plague-devastated village.
But the prose is beautiful and eloquent, and the portrayal of the secondary characters and the world they inhabit is utterly captivating.