Review: Unstisfying
Rating: 2 out of 5
Date: 12 22, 2011
This story sounded good to me. I eagerly downloaded it for free. Now I've finally finished, I'm glad I didn't pay anything for it.I was pulled in at the start, thinking this might turn out to be a 4 star book. The writing style took a little getting used to. Much of it seemed old-fashioned, but since the story started out in 1924, I was willing to go with that. The basic premise of unrequited love, a marriage of convenience, and an ambitious young man battling the odds kept me reading. Initially, the author did a fairly good job with an omniscient POV, which is generally difficult to pull off. Though this tended to keep all the characters distant, and I never felt much of a connection to any of them.And there are A LOT of them. This is not a book to put down and take up again next day. I tried this, and found I had lost track of who was who. But it's too long a book to read in one sitting, so I resigned myself to jotting notes. Ug.The heavy used of the passive voice made many scenes pass by as if it were all happening behind a scrim, or out of focus.Eventually, I came to the conclusion that the negatives in this book outweighed the positives.Positive: I wanted to find out what happened to the families.Negatives: Most of the characters are completely unsympathetic. The few I came to like had something horrible happen to them. Almost everyone is just mean and vindictive to each other. I kept waiting for good to win out, but it never does. There is nothing satisfying about the abrupt and ambiguous ending. I was left with the feeling that I slogged through all that nastiness of human nature with nothing at all to feel good about. Oh, and after years of loathing and contempt, turns out that was really just magnetic attraction in disguise? Yay, another dysfunctional partnership in the making. Wonderful.Remember that omniscient POV I mentioned? Well, it dissolved into distracting head-hopping. I'm pretty sure this story could have been told effectively without knowing the thoughts of every person in the scene, always.Often, the author was not content to show us fits of rage, but then felt the need to tell us the character was enraged. Yeah, I got that.Overall, I have to say the author didn't have quite the skills to manage this bakery. The writing was amateurish in many places. This confection--a dry doughnut with just a smidgen of cream filling to entice--ended up giving me indigestion.