SPOILER ALERT!
Mariana
It was boring. That is all.Alright, alright, details.
Story & Plot
Julia Beckett is a children's book illustrator who, on a seemingly random whim, moves from her apartment in London to a rather run-down but charming house in a little (and I mean little) village. She meets the villagers (not that there are very many of them) and settles into her new life, adapting rather easily to village life even though she's lived in London all her life.
Whilst getting to know the town, she hears a rumor that there used to be a ghost haunting her house thirty years prior- coincidentally, it disappeared around the time Julia was born.
Julia starts experiencing strange hallucinations of sorts- at random times, it seems as though the perspective of the character has changed; she is no longer Julia Beckett, but Mariana Farr, a young girl in seventeenth-century England desperately trying to escape contagion of the black plague.
It certainly sounds interesting at first, but as you read it, you see that Kearsley has done very little to expand on this idea. Most of Julia's time trips are dull. So. Very. Dull.
From wondering around her house to cooking to taking care of a baby, Mariana doesn't do much. I mean, I get that it's the seventeenth century, but still, if you're going to write a book that completely centers around a person experiencing another person's life, you should at least make that other life interesting. Even in just Mariana's life, there are plenty of other character who would have worked well in her place- the conspirators, the nobles, the people with the plague- anyone, really, would have been more interesting than Mariana and her ~forbidden love story~.
So, after some three hundred pages of time tripping and boring boring boring seventeenth-century conspiracies and romance, the pseudo-climax is finally reached. I say pseudo because wow this climax is boring as hell. And then, literally within the last five pages, Kearsley springs this plot twist on you, with barely any time to justify or explain. It seems like she got rather lazy with the ending and left it at that. What's more, it seems like she's been rather lazy wth the whole book. You only get glimpses of Mariana's life, and the holes are filled in with Julia's daily routine. It's like Kearsley couldn't write enough material for Mariana, so she stuffed up Julia in her place.
It's not memorable or interesting. It won't hold your attention for very long. It kinda... makes you wanna... fall... zzzz.....
Characters
Boring boring boring boring. I don't even remember most of them. What I do remember, however, is that none of them were likable enough to win my sympathy- or, alternately, none of them were annoying enough to warrant my dislike. In short, I didn't care for them, one way or another.
Cover
The cover's alright. It's kind of dull, but I've seen worse.
So, in short:
This book is so boring holy crap
This could have been a fantastic book. This could have been very interesting and memorable and a good read. However, Kearsley falls very far from her mark, and, having read another one of her books, it's become quite obvious to me that this is her writing style, and, honestly, it's not my favorite. Far from it, in fact.
Of course, this is my opinion, and just because I didn't like this book, doesn't mean no one else can. There are some people who enjoy this sort of slow-paced writing, but again, this isn't really my sort of book.
