Daddy-Long-Legs by Jean Webster
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

A book I read, courtesy my sister,the Book Thief, who bought it off a book fair in her school. I must admit I approached the book gingerly at first! Afterall nineteen is not the age to read such frivolous work of fiction, I told myself. But on her insistence, I started reading it anyway. And boy! Was I glad I read it!
Unlike its predecessors, 'Daddy-Long-Legs' does not claim a perfect heroine and a perfect role model for girls in the form of Jerusha Abbot. No, Jerusha is far from perfect. She is but a human, who experiences pain, envy, jealousy like all of us and she is not blind to her faults. Like all others, she acts hastily on impusle, then sits down to analyse her actions and thoughts and if need be, she apologises, too. To add up to all this, she's receptive to ideas and to the social conditions around her.
Perhaps because it is an epistolary novel, as my sister has carefully remarked on the first page of her edition, 'Daddy-Long-Legs' is unidirectional in its focus. Its ending, according to me, is also abrupt and far too romantic to be believable. However, it is one of the books I am glad to have read even though I did so at the age of nineteen!

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