Although it's billed as "the first great 19th-century novel of the 21st century," The Crimson Petal and the White is anything but Victorian. The story of a well-read London prostitute named Sugar, who spends her free hours composing a violent, pornographic screed against men, Michel Faber's dazzling second novel dares to go where George Eliot's The Mill on the Floss and the works of Charles Dickens could not. We learn about the positions and orifices that Sugar and her clients favor, about her lingering skin condition, and about the suspect ingredients of her prophylactic douches. Still, Sugar believes she can make a better life for herself. When she is taken up by a wealthy man, the perfumer William Rackham, her wings are clipped, and she must balance financial security against the obvious servitude of her position. The physical risks and hardships of Sugar's life (and the even harder "honest" life she would have led as a factory worker) contrast--yet not entirely--with the medical mistreatment of her benefactor's wife, Agnes, and beautifully underscore Faber's emphasis on class and sexual politics. In theme and treatment, this is a novel that Virginia Woolf might have written, had she been born 70 years later. The language, however, is Faber's own--brisk and elastic--and, after an awkward opening, the plethora of detail he offers (costume, food, manners, cheap stage performances, the London streets) slides effortlessly into his forward-moving sentences. When Agnes goes mad, for instance, "she sings on and on, while the house is discreetly dusted all around her and, in the concealed and subterranean kitchen, a naked duck, limp and faintly steaming, spreads its pimpled legs on a draining board." Despite its 800-plus pages, The Crimson Petal and the White turns out to be a quick read, since it is truly impossible to put down. --Regina Marler

I fell asleep trying to read this. An incredible amount of descriptive detail. Too much. I do not need an entire paragraph to tell me how uncomfortable a woman looks in her corset. I also do not need to know a person's entire life story if they are never appearing in the book again after page 30. I fell asleep everytime I picked it up. Thank goodness I did not take it to the tub with me. I would have drowned.

This book was absolutely a waste of time. The author was long winded and didn't take the story anywhere. Save your money. Infact, the author needs to pay you to read it.

The author write in 2nd person, so it's you who begins the book wandering through a late 1800s, Dickens-esque England. You immediately find yourself keeping company with various "women of ill repute" who are immediately humanized as women that the industrial revolution is not looking kindly upon. In order to make ends meet, these women have chosen to work less than their factory laboring counterparts in return for higher pay and shorter lifespans. And among these women is a highly-sought-after lady of intelligence and grace named Sugar. She's willing to do anything you want as well as have intelligent conversations with you, so she has many repeat customers. Only ... a newly rich young man wants her to himself.

In the beginning, I thought that everything was too good to be true. 200 pages in and no conflict had arisen. Everything went smoothly for every character at every turn. You don't realize that you expect conflict in a book until everything's perfect. And in fact, for some characters in the book, everything does always seem to go right. However, other characters only manage to spiral downward.

This is the story of a whore's rise from the Dickens-esque slums of England to a place of prominence in one of the finest families of uppity duppity Notting Hill. It's the story of a man's rise to riches in which he loses everything that's important to him. It's the story of a tortured man who loses his life while his terminally ill paramour recovers. It's the story of a mentally ill woman's flight to freedom. And it's the story of a little girl's luck of finally finding someone to love her.

With fields of endless lavender and 833 pages of text, this is quite a long book to commit to. It was a pleasant read throughout, but I wasn't staying up nights wanting to read yet more and more of it, so it took nearly a month to get through it. However, I think there are certain components of this book that I'll take with me in memory forever.

I could not put this book down, by the time Sugar was starting to care for the child Sophie, I was falling in love with Sugar. The ending was a bit vague, but strong enough for a story that shouldn't end. Maybe not everyone's cup of tea, but this was a very well written engaging story

It has been many years since I read this, and I still occasionally think on the characters as if they were people I once knew and wonder what's become of them. Often graphic, often disturbing, always consuming. Highly recommended.

If you find endings which are even remotely ambiguous to be unbearable, then maybe it's not for you. The soft end to this is what has cemented it in my memory. I don't intend to sound melodramatic, but it's more like a parting of ways rather than an ending. After all, there are no nice tied-in-a-bow endings in real life either.