Tone

After reading Adeline one of the observations I made is the very feminine tone Opie writes in. By this comment I do not mean to say that I found anything in this book to be feminist or over-the-top championing women. Rather, what I mean by the novel having a feminine is exactly that; you can just tell it was written by a woman. To cite a few examples, I will begin with character descriptions. Having read the novel cover to cover, I found it striking that Opie does a tremendous job describing the physical features of the men in the novel, particularly when there may be some connection with Adeline in the plot. Glenmurray, Barrendale, and Morduant all are given detailed descriptions so that they can be envisioned by the readers; conversely, I did not feel like, even through the entire novel, I could understand what Adeline looked like nor what she was wearing. It was as if Opie herself did not think it necessary, because she already knew, what a woman of the day looked like. Another thing I noticed about the novel was the frequency and amount which everybody cried. It seems Adeline cried in twenty-plus chapters and this excessive display of emotion took away from the realistic, albeit terrible, plot of the novel.