Precaution Book

Combine two parts Jane Austen, one part Brontë sisters, and just a dash of Patrick O'Brian, and you get this, James Fenimore Cooper's debut novel.

It started out pleasant enough, if unremarkable. But as I continued, small bits of especially clever writing would sneak their way into the novel, each time requiring me to set the book aside and spend several minutes savoring the passage I had just read.

Several hundred pages in, the plot seemed nearly to have run its course, and I was starting to wonder whether the story had anywhere left to go, and how the remaining hundred or so pages could possibly be anything other than some very slow wind-down. Instead, the book took delightfully unexpected turn, in both style and content, that had me riveted and unable to put it down for those final hundred pages.