I balked a bit when I saw how long this* book was, so I hoped it would keep me enthralled to the very distant end.
It didn't. It's a story (see About the Book below) encompassing nearly a hundred years, but it jumps about erratically. One minute we're in the early nineteen hundreds, and then we're in 2005. And back to 1975 and after that maybe back to 2005 or 1913 or even 1900. Or we could quite possibly not bother going back to any particular year and just read a fairy tale or two that the author decided we had to read because one of the main characters, Eliza Makepeace, was an authoress of fairy tales. All this was messy and frustrating and with a fair cast of characters you sometimes forgot who the heck was who.
None of the cardboard characters were in the least bit likeable or relatable, Eliza's sacrifice was beyond unbelievable, and the story just dragged on and on (and on) with just too many unneeded words. As for the included fairy tales, they are just a waste of your reading time.
I've reached the end of many books with 'oh no, I don't want this to end'. Ironically, this book never seemed to end, and I so wished it would. The misery was finally topped off by the author's acknowledgements that didn't even include a thank-you to her readers. They are the ones to whom any author owes his/her success the most.
*Provided by NetGalley
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