inconceivably

This was an amazing book in so many ways, I'm so glad I picked it up. I understand that it is classified as YA...but believe me, it would more than hold it's own in the adult section as well. There are 4 sections, most of the first, second and fourth are the "manuscripts of the boy Octavian", and the language is rich and very much of the eighteenth century. Have a dictionary handy--I sure needed one quite often.I was touched and outraged throughout all of Octavian's actual memoirs, but I thought the third section lagged a little, I even found myself just scanning parts of it. That is probably why I didn't give the book 5 stars.Anyway, I don't have much to say about the actual story. You need to read and experience it for yourself (and just WAIT until the curveball at the very end!).Here is one of my favorite sections:"...they told me of color, that it was an illusion of the eye, an event in the perceiver's mind, not in the object; they told me that color had no reality; indeed, they told me that color did not inhere in a physical body any more than pain was in a needle. And then they imprisoned me in darkness; and though there was no color there, I still was black, and they still were white; and for that, they bound and gagged me."