Ida and Beale, the shallow, narcissistic parents of 6 year old Maisie, are supposed to share custody by 6 month terms, according to the terms of their divorce. This arrangement soon deteriorates due to the parents' overriding desire, which is to undermine and punish each other, regardless of the effects on their child. Maisie suffers a great deal, but ultimately learns how to survive. Strikingly timely story, although more than 100 years old.

Not any easy read.

I've read some essays lately describing "readability" as a bad quality for literature. If that's true, then this book has a lot going for it. As in, long passages of questionable grammaticality and dubitable meaningfulness. The fact that it was written as a serial is painfully obvious, and half-way through you can scarcely believe how much soap-opera plot has happened already and what more could be ahead. And after suffering through to the end, we hardly know anything about Maisie at all: she's been nearly three-hundred pages of observing adults and having absolutely no interests or characteristics of her own.

3……3.35

Henry James never uses one word where he can use ten, and never uses ten where he can use a hundred. I think if this book were a hundred pages shorter, it would be much more effective. That being said, it's a powerful piece of work. Maisie is the child of emotionally abusive and neglectful parents, who use her as a bargaining chip and a way to inflict harm on one another. Gradually, they lose interest in her entirely, and she is left to the care of step-parents and governesses, none of whom have any real ability to care for her emotionally, or even educate her. The truths that Maisie is privy to feel relatively harmless to modern readers -- except the truth that her parents do not love her -- and her moral shortcomings do not seem all that immoral. But the theme of children being neglected and forced to witness actions and emotions unsuitable for their years is very relevant, as is the idea of children being the focal point of parental abuse. Thematically, this book feels timeless and apt to our current society, though James' prose style does make it hard to access.

I had been looking forward to reading this book for years now, and it did not disappoint. By some miracle, James was able to craft a precocious, perfectly innocent & incorruptible narrator that was not mind shatteringly irritating, like so many are. Everything we see is through Maisie's little eyes, and it is up to us adult readers to interpret what she sees, and to work out what Maisie knows and what is going on over her head. You can't help but feel sympathy for her plight, shuttles between a growing number of adults who see her only as a means to an end, and a couple who genuinely love her but are still unable to provide the stability & constancy that she craves. This was such an enjoyable read, James writes in such an engaging and entertaining way. This feels like a book I will want to read over & over again, picking it apart and trying to figure out how much Maisie really does know.

Okay, I wanted to like this, you know, classic literature and all. I was intrigued by the story line, and the title character was engaging and sympathetic. It had all the right ingredients, but then Henry James went and mucked it all up by using so many damn words! Half the time I had to read passages three or four times in an ultimately-failed attempt to discern what the hell was going on. Ugh. Maybe this is more of a statement about my own intellectual level, but I was flummoxed by more of this writing than I expected I'd be. I got the gist of the story-- which was actually quite heartbreaking-- but the whole reading experience didn't flow smoothly for me, making this not an enjoyable read overall.

Accurate to the point of caricature, but sadly this is how children are used as ammunition in the battles amongst adults. Still quite funny tho, but with the many allusions i found myself at times as lost as poor Maisie.