I got bored. Which meant I started picking at things like how it's simultaneously real-world (set in France) but with metaphorical characters (like the Fates and Chance as anthropomorphic personifications) and it takes a better author than this one to pull that off. And how all the really nasty villains are women. And how a pack of mean girls in a rural French village feels like the author is trying too hard.
All the asides, flashbacks, and authorial intrusion with heavy-handed metaphor slowed the pace down to such a crawl that I eventually hit a pause and found myself griping at Melissa who always responds to that impertinence by asking "so why are you still reading this?" To which the answer is almost always "huh. Yeah, I guess I'm done, now."
I'm going ahead with one-star for a rating, but want to make explicit that this is likely a personal response and idiosyncratic. Your response will almost certainly vary.
All the asides, flashbacks, and authorial intrusion with heavy-handed metaphor slowed the pace down to such a crawl that I eventually hit a pause and found myself griping at Melissa who always responds to that impertinence by asking "so why are you still reading this?" To which the answer is almost always "huh. Yeah, I guess I'm done, now."
I'm going ahead with one-star for a rating, but want to make explicit that this is likely a personal response and idiosyncratic. Your response will almost certainly vary.