Ratings

Content Ratings based on a 0-5 scale where
0 = no objectionable content and
5 = an excessive or disturbing level of content

Guide to Rating System

LANGUAGE

VIOLENCE

SEXUAL CONTENT

ADULT THEMES

Ratings Explanation

Language:  Sporadic use of common swear words. A few religious exclamations.

Sexual Content: A brief discussion about the possibility of  Rose selling herself on the streets of London. Rose imagines herself in bed with Simon, but with no details. The “facts of life” mentioned twice. A couple of kisses, one of which turns passionate. The phrase “make love to” is used a handful of times, with the meaning “to court or woo”, not as we would interpret it today. It is implied that a teenage boy engaged in an affair with a married woman, but it is very vague as to whether anything actually happened between them or not.

Adult Themes: A family lives in poverty because the father, a writer,  is unable to provide for them. Some class issues.

Synopsis

Seventeen-year-old Cassandra Mortmain is the witty and sensitive narrator of I Capture the Castle. A budding writer and apt observer, Cassandra chronicles 7 months of her family’s life in a once glorious English castle. Her father, a formerly famous writer, has been suffering from writer’s block for a number of years and the family lives on next to no income, but Cassandra seems undaunted by their financial privations and early in the book remarks, “I shouldn’t think even millionaires could eat anything nicer than new bread and real butter and honey for tea.”

In an exercise to hone her writing skills, Cassandra fills three journals with her musings and the exciting events that present themselves when two eligible bachelors from America move into the neighboring estate. Rose, Cassandra’s older sister, is determined to escape her family’s poverty and sets her sights on the elder brother Simon, who has just inherited his wealthy grandfather’s lands. Cassandra and her stepmother, Topaz, join the plot to help Simon fall in love, knowing that an alliance between the two families will greatly relieve the suffering of the Mortmain family.

Through the turbulent events of this half year, Cassnadra experiences her own first kiss and the pangs of young love. This defining period leads her through the end of her childhood and the beginnings of womanhood. She looses parts of herself and her life that were dear to her as a child, but emerges a stronger and more self-assured woman in the end.

My favorite part of the book is  Cassandra’s voice and humor. I do love a smart and witty young heroine, which Cassandra most certainly is, but her step-mother Topaz is equally endearing. What would the family do without her? She is the one who improvises an old door for a dining table and drapes bed linens on the windows when her husband invites the neighbors to a dinner party, having forgotten that because he earns no money, they have sold almost everything! Smith’s writing is lovely and makes the family’s near destitute poverty seem romantic and inspiring.

Although Cassandra’s shift into adulthood was realistic and natural, I did like the younger, more innocent character better. She was much more fun. I did not love the ending, but overall greatly enjoyed this book.

Speaking of her sister Rose, Cassandra writes, “I suppose it was her sheer despair of ever meeting any marriageable men at all, even hideous, poverty-stricken ones, that made her suddenly burst into tears. As she only cries about once a year I really ought to have gone over and comforted her, but I wanted to set it all down here. I begin to see that writers are liable to become callous.”