The Scarlet Pimpernel

I read The Scarlet Pimpernel by Baroness Orczy for my (adult) book club. The book description says, "The year is 1792. The French Revolution, driven to excess by its own triumph, has turned into a reign of terror. Daily, tumbrels bearing new victims to the guillotine roll over the cobbled streets of Paris.… Thus the stage is set for one of the most enthralling novels of historical adventure ever written.
The mysterious figure known as the Scarlet Pimpernel, sworn to rescue helpless men, women, and children from their doom; his implacable foe, the French agent Chauvelin, relentlessly hunting him down; and lovely Marguerite Blakeney, a beautiful French exile married to an English lord and caught in a terrible conflict of loyalties—all play their parts in a suspenseful tale that ranges from the squalid slums of Paris to the aristocratic salons of London, from intrigue on a great English country estate to the final denouement on the cliffs of the French coast."

I ended up liking this book, but boy was it hard for me to get into it at the beginning! I had the book for more than a month and only read like 30 pages. Finally I was down to the wire in terms of the book club meeting coming up, so I forced myself to read more--and finally got into it and finished the rest of the book in just a few days. The old fashioned language was just hard for me to follow, and I just wasn't pulled into the story at first. But I ended up enjoying it and finding it very adventurous at the end. I'm proud of myself for getting through it. :) I also found on this blog that I read this book like 10 years ago (which I hardly remembered) and felt pretty much the same about it. :)

Rating: * * (2/3 = Liked it)