3.5
This book isn’t quite sure what it wants to do: so it tries to do everything. We’ve got loads of characters, plot lines, themes, and threads. For a commercial historical fiction, it doesn’t do a bad job at covering all the moving parts, but if you’re looking for depth, nuance, or grit, you won’t find it here.
The characters are a mixed bag:
• I really liked the “girls” (the young women at the cottage) but felt deeply annoyed by their situation. They basically move from one prison to another, they’re not allowed to talk about their lives at all, they’re perved on by a priest, a cop, a random boy loitering in the street, they’re being forced to leave the only country they’ve ever known… and they’re supposed to be grateful for it. It was heartbreaking and illustrates how harmful detached “do gooders” really can be.
• Angela grated on my nerves and she treated the cottage like a fair weather hobby at best. She was flakey and unreliable; she couldn’t spend five minutes in her own company and grew to be quite tedious as a character. Her treatment of the matron was appalling and her obsession with the duke pretty cringey. While we’re told that the “girls” idolized Angela, that was never authentic to me. We didn’t really see plausible evidence that would make these smart, skeptical women trust her - she mostly just treated them like a pet someone else was expected to care for when things got less shiny.
• The Dickens character probably could’ve been omitted because it was the heaviest absent side character I’ve read in recent memory: his involvement merely a repetitive name drop.
The story itself was quite surface level. As above, it really tries to do too much so nothing is as fleshed out as it could’ve been. We had a lot of threads: the cottage, Annie/Josephine, stalker thread, Martha, Polly, Josephine, missing sister thread, weird Angela/Duke romance thread, seedy London brothels… and it was all just too much. Everything felt rushed where I would have appreciated more time and nuance. The atmosphere wasn’t as rich as I’d read in similar books and the sense of time and place didn’t come alive the way I’d hoped.
The whole cottage thing was mighty weird. I was reading about it online and I’m not surprised it failed. It was obviously an arms length ego project and I feel badly for the women who might’ve experienced the sharp end of Victorian ethics and charity there.
The ending was a bit predictable and twee (spoilers removed).
All in all, this was a readable, fast-paced and engaging story; I just wanted a bit more from it than it was able to give. I received this book through the Readers First UK programme, which was pretty cool. I was expecting an ARC but I seem to have received the publication edition early. There were a few formatting and spelling errors but that seems, sadly, common for publication copies lately.
This book isn’t quite sure what it wants to do: so it tries to do everything. We’ve got loads of characters, plot lines, themes, and threads. For a commercial historical fiction, it doesn’t do a bad job at covering all the moving parts, but if you’re looking for depth, nuance, or grit, you won’t find it here.
The characters are a mixed bag:
• I really liked the “girls” (the young women at the cottage) but felt deeply annoyed by their situation. They basically move from one prison to another, they’re not allowed to talk about their lives at all, they’re perved on by a priest, a cop, a random boy loitering in the street, they’re being forced to leave the only country they’ve ever known… and they’re supposed to be grateful for it. It was heartbreaking and illustrates how harmful detached “do gooders” really can be.
• Angela grated on my nerves and she treated the cottage like a fair weather hobby at best. She was flakey and unreliable; she couldn’t spend five minutes in her own company and grew to be quite tedious as a character. Her treatment of the matron was appalling and her obsession with the duke pretty cringey. While we’re told that the “girls” idolized Angela, that was never authentic to me. We didn’t really see plausible evidence that would make these smart, skeptical women trust her - she mostly just treated them like a pet someone else was expected to care for when things got less shiny.
• The Dickens character probably could’ve been omitted because it was the heaviest absent side character I’ve read in recent memory: his involvement merely a repetitive name drop.
The story itself was quite surface level. As above, it really tries to do too much so nothing is as fleshed out as it could’ve been. We had a lot of threads: the cottage, Annie/Josephine, stalker thread, Martha, Polly, Josephine, missing sister thread, weird Angela/Duke romance thread, seedy London brothels… and it was all just too much. Everything felt rushed where I would have appreciated more time and nuance. The atmosphere wasn’t as rich as I’d read in similar books and the sense of time and place didn’t come alive the way I’d hoped.
The whole cottage thing was mighty weird. I was reading about it online and I’m not surprised it failed. It was obviously an arms length ego project and I feel badly for the women who might’ve experienced the sharp end of Victorian ethics and charity there.
The ending was a bit predictable and twee (spoilers removed).
All in all, this was a readable, fast-paced and engaging story; I just wanted a bit more from it than it was able to give. I received this book through the Readers First UK programme, which was pretty cool. I was expecting an ARC but I seem to have received the publication edition early. There were a few formatting and spelling errors but that seems, sadly, common for publication copies lately.