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"No entertainment is so cheap as reading, nor any pleasure so lasting"
-Mary Wortley Montagu
-Mary Wortley Montagu
Too Many Perfect Protagonists. No Antagonists.First, that had to be the shortest prologue in history (that I've ever read) and seemed absolutely pointless. No revelations, no build-up, no surprises...zero point. That did not bode well, in my mind, for the remainder of the book.
Then came Chapter 1. Same thing. Abrupt introduction to "Baby Theobold". Nothing to make me become invested in him and his plight (I'm assuming) of "having to make his own way in the world" because he wouldn't be inheriting his family's plantation. Next chapter just got worse. The mild mistakes in mechanics that I noticed in the beginning suddenly became glaring in the next chapter. Here's the formatting of dialogue, as it appears in the eBook. One person is speaking, but the dialogue is broken down as if two or more are: "I just thought it would be nice to give her an outing," sobbed Sybil. (next line) "I never knew her time was so close..." (next line) "In fact, none of us knew..." (next line) "She hid it very well..." And what is an "outing" anyway, in relation to childbirth? Anyway, as I continued reading, I became more and more disappointed. The story was amateurish, as was the writing. The dialogue was not realistic, and formatted strangely. There was zero character development, in more ways than one: First, these were just people. There was nothing in the way they were written to make me care about them. Second, the characters were all the same: bland, zero depth, zero growth, zero character. When all your characters are perfectly well-behaved, there is nothing for the reader to feel for, root for, hope for. There needs to be protagonists as well as antagonists. This book had all protagonists, and way too many of those. It was if the writer wanted to write a story about a bunch of people, but only managed to bury who the story was supposed to actually be about--Daisy. Recommended? No.
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