First Impression Friday – Tess of D’Urbervilles!

This meme was created by Joe from JW Martin – Storeys of stories!

The rules:

• Read first chapter (or chapters if they are short)
• Give my ‘first impression’
• Predict my rating
• After finishing it, compare the results 🙂

So this time I decided to go with Tess of d’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy. I honestly didn’t really know anything about this one before starting it, I just expected this to be some kind of romance novel. But I knew I enjoyed Thomas Hardy other book, Far from the madding crowd, so I was definitely interested in reading more of his work!

Title: Tess of D’Urbervilles.

Author: Thomas Hardy.

Format: Audiobook.

Genre: Classic, romance.

First impressions:

It is very hard to form an opinion already, because honestly nothing has really happened. We just got introduced to our main character, Tess.

I do really like the writing and the narration. I’m always a bit worried about listening to classics, since sometimes they are too hard for me to follow. But I think for this one it is the right option!

I’m excited to continue on, 4 stars?!

Final thoughts:

I like how in my first impressions I said that audiobook was a good way to go for this one. Now I would say it was not. This book is about Tess Durbeyfield and a family D’Urbervilles, I took me very long to realize that those names were not the same, since they sound exactly the same on audio! So as you can imagine, this was very confusing. Also I thought the book was a bit boring, so it took a bit of effort to pick up this audiobook sometimes and it was very easy for me to tune out while I was listening.. I think for the next coming classics I read I should try and physically read them again, I think I will be more able to follow along and focus.

Another problem I had was with Angel Clare. Actually I had two problems, one was that it took me a while to realize that ‘Angel’ and ‘Clare’ were the same person, but that could be because of the audio! Another problem was that he was so mean.. I don’t want to spoil anything, in case you haven’t read this one. But he doesn’t forgive Tess for something that was clearly not her fault, and she struggled with it enough without him being mean about it..

I did really enjoy the writing, and Tess! Also the ending quite surprised me, in a good way!

I ended up giving this book 3 stars!

Have you read this book? What did you think?