Books : The House of the Seven Gables (Signet Classics)
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by: Nathaniel Hawthorne
Amazon.com's Price: $5.95 Prices subject to change. Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.3
EAN: 9780451527912
ISBN: 0451527917
Label: Signet Classics
Manufacturer: Signet Classics
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 288
Publication Date: May 01, 2001
Publisher: Signet Classics
Release Date: May 08, 2001
Sales Rank: 395066
Studio: Signet Classics
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Editorial Review:
Product Description:
An evil house, cursed through the centuries by a man who was hanged for witchcraft, is haunted by the ghosts of its sinful dead, wracked by the fear of its frightened living. Written as a follow-up to The Scarlet Letter, The House of the Seven Gables is truly a masterful blending of the actual and the imaginary.
Customer Reviews
Average Rating: 
Rating:  - An extremely interesting story
"Half-way down a by-street of one of our New England towns, stands a rusty wooden house, with seven acutely peaked gables, facing towards various points of the compass, and a huge, clustered chimney in the midst." And this solid and antique house contains many things - memories of those who lived and died there, and the terrible secrets that haunted those long dead, and haunt the living to this very day. This is the story of Hepzibah Pyncheon, an old maid who carries the weight of the past like a ... Read More
Rating: - Hawthorne as Dark Humorist
This isn't exactly a page turner, for that you should check out Hawthorne's short stories. However, the writing here is very good and the story is interesting. What struck me most of all about this book, however, is how funny it is. Not funny in a joke-cracking way, knee-slapping kind of way, but Hawthorne has a very dark sense of humor, and in this book he deals with dark themes like death, curses, witchcraft, and old age in a surprisingly humorous and deadpan manner. He writes the best death ... Read More
Rating:  - More fun than I thought it would be
Purchased in anticipation of a trip to Salem, MA to visit the actual House of the Seven Gables, I have to admit that I enjoyed this book far more than I thought I was going to. Written in 1851, The House of the Seven Gables is at once both a period romance and history of the Pyncheon family, focusing on a several week period of the lives of the current owner, Hepzibah Pyncheon, her brother Clifford, cousin Phoebe and their lodger, Holgrave. Themes of guilt and retribution run throughout the novel, ... Read More
Rating:  - ponderous
Dusty classics of this type when assigned to poor high-school kids typically elicit a wave of one- and two-star reviews consisting mostly of complaints that the work was "boring", usually for the reasons of too much description or most commonly, "no plot". They have trouble simply getting through it, but their school deems the work edifying, or at least did the last time anybody bothered to review the reading lists, so it's off to SparkNotes and the sham continues.
I claim boredom for ... Read More
Rating: - Departure from what I normally read, but good
I've had a copy of the House of Seven Gables sitting on my bookshelf for a number of years. The poor little book is slightly out of place between a plethora of fantasy and science fiction novels. Every once in a while I try to venture into a different realm of subject. That's the reason I finally picked up this book to read. I would have read it sooner but I was forced to read "The Scarlet Letter" in high school and never had the heart to read another Nathaniel Hawthorne novel.
Not ... Read More
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