This may be a good book or even an excellent book, but I'm so tired of the theme I can hardly process the quality. It's about an ambitious woman who seizes her chances, climbs to power, uses her beauty to get men to do what she wants, and so on. She wonders if she is in fact able to love, if perhaps she's made wrong for love. A fine character study, but after reading a hundred such studies I could hardly keep my eyes open for another.
Many books fall into comfortable patterns.
This book, however, has its own peculiar pattern, and if you try to read it with a classic pattern in mind you'll find yourself getting lost and frustrated. Later I realized that although those entries serve no classic function in a classic mystery novel, this is not a classic mystery novel. The other half may be about the crimes, or maybe not. Or perhaps not. I finished the last page with a feeling that I hadn't grasped the point or understood any of the characters, but that like it or not I would be spending the next few days mulling it over.