Task: Sentiment Analysis
Input (English): Only connect? . Our entire book club disliked this book. We had a hard time feeling a connection to the characters. Howard, the largest presence in this story, feels like a blank at the core. Upon putting this book down, his motivations and what might be in his heart were still a mystery to me. Characters such as Jerome, Victoria, and Carl were intriguingly introduced, but then inconsistently treated for the rest of the text. Especially Carl - he just disappears - no resolution to his story at all. As am homage to Howard's End, some of the parallels were not strongly enough underscored to flesh out this book for me. For example, the heart-to-heart connection between Kiki Belsey and Carlene Kipps does not jump off the page at you the way the connection between Margaret Schlegel and Mrs. Wilcox did.     I thought Zora was one of the most interesting characters, and I like how Smith contrasted her obviously high intelligence and intellectual arrogance with her social awkwardness and sexual insecurity. But Smith makes her smug a bit too often, and so feeling a connection with Zora is difficult as well - most of the time I just wanted to smack her. And I have to agree with the others that Smith needs to brush up on her American characterizations. There was next to no authenticity in that regard. Especially the Southern dialogue - laughable!    It also feels like Smith had a hard time figuring out how to end this book...I understand that end is supposed to be a beginning of sorts...but the fact that there were so many plot threads left dangling, unresolved, by the last page just gave me a feeling of incomplete-ness.     Aaaargh...must go and re-read Howard's End to dispell the queasy feeling left by On Beauty
Output (English): NEG