This book took me forever to read. You know why? It was boring. Really, truly dull. Not the best start to my Gothic challenge for the year.
It finally began to get a little more interesting in the last fifty pages, but by then I didn't care all that much.
Gothics aren't known for lightning speeds of action-paced adventure or anything, but this slowly unwinding thing never had much depth to begin with. There wasn't a huge mystery and most of it was spent on her wanting to redecorate the house and fawning over the local island stud. Every small thing was too dramatic. The writing felt a bit stilted and overdone, not adding to the excitement of the story.
Characters were decent enough, I suppose, but I never felt that attraction to her main guy. To me there wasn't anything sweet, exciting, or stimulating about him. If anything, he seemed to lack personality. There's some unconventional ooh-la-la in this book for the proper time period it's illustrating.
The back cover of the book states:
"Now, heartbroken by her father's death and the loss of her great love..."
Stop right here. This isn't accurate. The protagonist makes it clear from the start she's not grief-stricken over her father. She hates he's dead, of course, but keeps bringing up the fact that they weren't close and that she hadn't seen him in years. In addition, there was no great love lost. She started getting over him minutes within reaching the island.
The end villain(s) turned out a little obvious. There was a very small cast of suspects to wonder about anyway, and while the reasoning behind it wasn't clear from the start, it was easy to see where the villain would pop up from and why.
Not the best start to my challenge of reading 30 Gothics this year, hopefully the next one is much better. I have to wonder, whatever happened to that precious white cat?
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