Elisa Romagnoli
I love all that I learned about divorce, divorce strategies, and women detectives in mid-19th century Britain. I also enjoyed that neither the book nor the love interest were misogynistic. It was a breath of fresh air to not have to wade through misogynistic bullshit in a historical romance. However, the meat and potatoes, the writing in this book was weak. I think a couple more rounds of revision could've made this a fantastic read. There were prose issues, dialogue issues, more depth needed to be added to sentence/paragraph structure and the plot had some pacing issues. Overall not a bad book, but I also can't say that it's good, unfortunately.
As I said before, with a little more time in revision, this book could've been really good.
I liked the meandering tone that others don't seem too, as much. I also thought it was an interesting consideration of the ways that society/social circumstances pit women against each other and together and the interpersonal conflict that we see bloom from these contrived differences and boundaries.
A little preachy perhaps at parts so a star off for that.
Over all, enjoyed it though.
The characters are better in this book, towards the end in her monologue it does feel a bit like she doesn't have a partner to help her out at all. I feel like we don't at all explore the ways he makes things better or worse and he doesn't appear to help with housekeeping at all.
Too many sex scenes too.
But the characters and story felt richer than her previous two books in this series. Her description of autism also translated better in this book i believe than the past two, as someone without it, it gave me more clarity and insight into some of the nuances of autism for an individual without feeling like it was supposed to be any broad overgeneralizing description of every autistic person.
Makes a few of fatphobic, classist and lowkey racist remarks in some places and smart, interesting notations on history in others. Made it a rollercoaster of a read. Also failed to recognize the israeli/british invasion of palestine. And completely ignores immigration and refuges in his analysis of peace. Also completely ignores the threat of climate change. These deliberately ignored subjects would give a more naunced take on his conclusions about the modern world.
This books started out as one of the most frustrating books i've ever read. But her growth from ‘pick me' girl boss feminism into a holistic feminism that truly supports and carries the women around her with humility was interesting to see.
The first quarter of the book was also plagued with telling not showing in an effort to quickly establish the character and her circumstances and it drove me nuuuuts. Pretty bad writing choice. If this book were traditionally written in chapters, i would've never made it past the first one or two. I wanted to initially give this book a half star review. She eventually grew into the story she was writing but it took way to long, making this book feel like a draft rather than a completed, published work.
