Sorry but I HATED this book. I found it meandering and pretentious. Orlando was extremely unlikeable as was pretty much every other character. The racism was off-putting. Crudely put it read to me like pretty well written fanfiction. I don't need books to have a strong plot to enjoy them but this was unbearable and it got worse and worse as I went on. What makes me hate this book most is that I love the premise. There were so many times that I started to enjoy the book and look forward to where the story would go and then a few pages later the endless meandering reflective garbagr would come which progressively made Orlando more and more irritating and vain to me. The voice of the biographer was even more irritating to read. I found very little funny in this book more just grating. 

This book was one of the most interesting classics I have ever read.
It deals with so many interesting topics, the most prevalent being gender. Orlando is born as a boy and we follow his life until one night when his body changes and she wakes up as a woman. From then one we get a very interesting perspective on gender and gender performance from a perspective that knows what it is like to be a man and also now knows the struggles of women.

This book is about writing, finding oneself, dealing with societal expectations and pressures, going after ones passions and acceptance. It is a very nuanced book which I greatly enjoyed. Time passes quite funnily as well. Though Orlando is 36 in the end of the novel the narrative starts in the Elizabethan age and ends in the 20th century.

As progressive this book is and how many interesting thoughts about gender and society are presented, there are still some problematic parts. The n* word is used and in the beginning of the book there is a very gruesome scene which is offensive and might me very hard to read for certain people.

Just gonna start with the fact that like many things labeled as subversive and full of subtext *for its time*, it's just frantically racist. Spare yourself that if you want. And most of the transgressive queerness is vanilla and silly if you're not living in a pretty repressed portion of 1928.

Like many things occupied with being literature and saying things of importance, the book doesn't have much in the way of characters or plot, but it's not really about either of those things, it's about wry social commentary from a position that doesn't recognize itself as privileged and blinkered, and it's pretty good at being that? I'd never noticed that Douglas Adams had some very Virginia Woolf rhythms before, anyway. And a rewrite that dealt with the fact that this is in fact a sci-fi novel would be fascinating. 

Orlando takes an interesting concept and does absolutely nothing worthwhile or interesting while boring the reader to death with the purplest of prose. As a bonus, there is a plethora of racial slurs and colonialist sentiment.

There is a moderate use of derogatory language and views to minorities in this book and the use of slurs of which include the n-word. I wasn’t warned or told about this before buying or reading so I would like to warn especially black people that use of those slurs are in there. This knowledge is then up to you if you wish to read the book. 

love love love 

(minus points for racism and the fact that the end kind of dragged on a bit)